Network Congestion - Avoidance - Side Effects of Congestive Collapse Avoidance - Short-lived Connections

Short-lived Connections

The slow-start protocol performs badly for short-lived connections. Older web browsers would create many consecutive short-lived connections to the web server, and would open and close the connection for each file requested. This kept most connections in the slow start mode, which resulted in poor response time.

To avoid this problem, modern browsers either open multiple connections simultaneously or reuse one connection for all files requested from a particular web server. However, the initial performance can be poor, and many connections never get out of the slow-start regime, significantly increasing latency.