Every once in a while I'm still surprised at the potential
upside of pipelines.
I stumbled across a great example recently:
Women In Technology International. That home page is setup in a pretty typical newsletter format. It has 159 resources, 145 of which are images along with about a half dozen pieces of js and css. Most of the images are small, with over 2/3 of them loading in less than 20ms of transfer time (time to first byte removed).
What is striking about this page is how large of an advantage pipelining can give even on a well connected broadband desktop with a 100ms RTT to the witi hosting facility.
The average latency to receive the first byte of a resource dropped from 1697ms to 626ms, and the average elapsed time per transaction overall dropped from 1719ms to 652ms. Aggregate that over 159 different resources and you have some serious gains!
But why stop there? The pipeline sweet spot is in high latency situations such as mobile, or trans continental data transfer. This is what happens when we add 200 ms of latency to the connection:
That's right - 3300ms of improvement on each transaction! That seems absurdly good if we only added 200ms of latency, but what you're seeing is the aggregate queueing effect - Firefox wants 150 resources more or less simultaneously and can only parallelize it on 6 connections. If you are 25 positions deep on that queue you will have to wait
at least 7500ms just for the back and forth of each transaction in front of you to complete.. obviously not everyone is queued that deeply so the average effect is somewhat less, but still overwhelming.
