Is HTTP 1.1 pipelining discouraged in native mobile apps?

Question

For several years, I've been facing problems with HTTP 1.1 pipelining & continued to ask the server to send the HTTP Header:

Connection: close

I want to revisit this decision. Does your native mobile apps use HTTP pipelining ? Some problems with HTTP pipelining I've faced:

• Server not releasing TCP connections
• My client is receiving multiple replies from one HTTP connection

Answer 1

That's exactly what persistent connections and pipelining are for: keeping the TCP connection open until the timeout expires (or the browser closes), and sending multiple requests down the same pipe.

You might want to consider removing persistent connections if your server serves a high number of clients (you might run out of workers, RAM, or even free ports, raising response time for new requests)

If you want to read further, a pointer about persistent connection behaviour