> dumping answers in to the pipe pre-emptively That's a very interesting hack, but I hope no one decides to deploy it today. You really can't predict what the

> dumping answers in to the pipe pre-emptively That's a very interesting hack, but I hope no one decides to deploy it today. You really can't predict what the next request will be - the browser can reuse the connection for some other request at a whim. And I'm sure there's some proxy around that will panic if it gets a response before getting a request. > Keep-alive on pretty much implies that pipelining is ok. Well, sure, in theory. But since nearly every browser keeps it off (edit: doesn't pipeline requests), obviously a ton of servers are broken. Even Flickr was broken for many years with pipelining on (image downloads would abort randomly). Chrome is planning to eventually enable it with a bunch of heuristics; hopefully that will improve the situation. Edit: "Making HTTP Pipelining Usable on the Open Web": http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-pipeline-00 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-pipeline-00