CODEWITHSUNDEEP
httpwebsocket
ryeguy
ryeguy

Reputation: 66891

Would you see a significant speedup using a single websocket connection for all requests on a website?

Imagine I'm building an ordinary old website. Not a game, not a chat program, an ordinary website. Let's say it's a stack overflow clone.

The client side would simply make service calls to the server side. The server is essentially a dumb data store and never sends down HTML. The client handles all templating via javascript.

If I established a single websocket connection and did all requests through that, would I see a significant speedup over doing ajax requests?

The obvious advantage to using a single connection is that it only has to be established once. But how much time does that actually save? I know establishing a TCP connection can be costly, but in the grand scheme of things, does it matter?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 351

Answers (2)

Greg
Greg

Reputation: 8340

One HTTP connection can only by used for one HTTP request at the same time. Say that a page requested a 100Kb document, nothing else will be send from the client to the server until that 100Kb document has been transferred. This is called head-of-line blocking. The client can establish an additional connection with the server, but there is also a limit on the amount of concurrent connections with the same server.

One of the primary reasons for developing SPDY and later HTTP/2 was solving this exact problem. However, support for SPDY and HTTP/2 is not yet as widespread as for WebSocket. WebSocket can get you there earlier because it supports multiple streams in full-duplex mode.

Once HTTP/2 is better supported it will be the preferred solution for this problem, but WebSocket will still be better for real-time web applications, where server needs to push data to the client.

Have a look at the N2O framework, it was created to address the problems I described above. In N2O WebSocket is used to send all assets associated with a page.

How much speed you could gain from using WebSocket instead of standard HTTP requests pretty much depends on your specific website: how often it requests data from the server, how big is a typical response, etc.

Upvotes: 1

Jonas
Jonas

Reputation: 129065

I would not recommend websockets for webpages. HTTP 1.1 can reuse a TCP-connection for multiple requests, it's only HTTP 1.0 that had to use a new TCP connection for each request.

SPDY is probably a protocol that do what you are looking for. See SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web, but it's only supported by Chrome.

If you use websockets, the requests will not be cached.

Upvotes: 1

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