Evaluating Connection Coalescing For Static and Media Asset Downloads

DRANK

One of the core aspirations of the engineering teams at LinkedIn is to delight our members with instantaneous page load experiences. To achieve this, we strive for optimal configurations and settings across the different layers of our software stack. Recently, we completed a large-scale experiment in reusing TCP/IP connections and found a perceivable drop in the 90th percentile page load time. While the production rollout of this strategy is still in the planning steps, we wanted to share the initial findings, explain the details of connection coalescing, and walk through how we conducted the experiment.