[dragonwriter]

> So to answer your question: Header compression as employed in HTTP 2.0 helps if you do many requests with similar headers on the same connection.

In general, HTTP/2.0 seems to be about improving things if you do many requests over the same connection.

[stephen_g]

I think this is correct - because that is one big area where TCP and HTTP really fall short.

HTTP/2 should be a huge improvement for lowering latency in anything but the simplest web sites, without having to use ugly hacks such as sprite sheets and putting all your javascript/CSS in one file (which is sub-optimal in terms of caching if you want to update say a single javascript file, because then a user with a full cache has to re-download the huge concatenated javascript file instead of just the single source that changed), and avoiding spanning things across multiple domains to get around browsers having a connection limit.

[ademarre]

Doing many requests over the same connection is very common.

[frankzinger]

And one of the fundamental goals of HTTP/2 was to get clients to create only a single connection to a server.

[patrickmcmanus]

right. The other key fact is that request header compression is necessary to make parallelism work when interacting with tcp congestion control. Its critical.