Example B-4. The HTML document http://example.com/wine.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" > <html> <head><title>Grapes and Glass</title></head> <body> <img src="http://example.com/grapes.gif"> <p>Welcome to my simple page <p><img src="http://example.com/glass.gif"> </body> </html>
After requesting the HTML document and processing it, the browser makes two additional requests for the resources grapes.gif and glass.gif. In all, three separate HTTP requests must be made to display the page. However, the browser can make the two requests for the images simultaneously. The browser isn't concerned about the order in which the images are retrieved and, because each request is independent, TCP/IP can't guarantee that the requests are responded to in any particular order.
Sending requests in parallel allows a browser to maximize the use of available network bandwidth. However, a browser can make only a limited number of parallel requests with improvements to performance and, typically, a limit of four simultaneous requests provides the best results. The ability to send requests simultaneously allows a web browser to use more network capacity relative to other applications. An application such as FTP communicates through one TCP connection and therefore has access to less bandwidth when a web browser makes four TCP connections in parallel.
At the server end, simultaneous requests can be treated independently and may not even be processed by the same web server. A common way to handle high volumes of requests is to use specialized network hardware to balance connections across multiple web servers running on different machines. The stateless nature of HTTP allows for such configurations. We discussed the issues of session management and the stateless nature of HTTP in Chapter 8.