HTTP pipelining

HTTP pipelining is a feature of HTTP/1.1, which allows multiple HTTP requests to be sent over a single TCP connection without waiting for the corresponding responses.

HTTP/1.1 requires servers to respond to pipelined requests correctly, with non-pipelined but valid responses even if server does not support HTTP pipelining. Despite this requirement, many legacy [HTTP/1.1] servers do not support pipelining correctly, forcing most HTTP clients to not use HTTP pipelining.

The technique was superseded by multiplexing via [HTTP/2], which is supported by most modern browsers.

In [HTTP/3], multiplexing is accomplished via [QUIC] which replaces [TCP]. This further reduces loading time, as there is no head-of-line blocking even if some packets are lost.