Connection Caching

Communication between clients and servers in the Web is performed using TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) . TCP first opens a connection between the two nodes and then sends data packets via this open connection. The time needed to open a connection contributes to the latency of servicing a request. Hence, latency can be reduced if open connections are kept idle and re-used for future requests. Indeed, new versions of HTTP support that. Web servers and proxies typically maintain many open connections, many of them idle. The number of connections each node can keep open is limited. Hence, connection management is increasingly perceived and handled as a caching problem. A fundamenta