HTTP pipelining is a performance optimization that is often overlooked due to its low adoption rate – only the Opera browser uses it by default on desktop .

However, on Mobile HTTP pipelining has a much higher adoption rate – at least the Android and Opera browsers employ it, accounting for about 40% of mobile browsing! In this post we’ll explain what is pipelining, how is it used by the browsers, and what you as a web developer should do about it.
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There’s a common understanding across the performance industry that the cache sizes on mobile devices are small. While everybody seems to agree on that fact, we couldn’t find the actual cache size indicated anywhere. So we measured it – and the conclusion is that they’re indeed much too small.

The detailed methodology is outlined further down, but here’s the summary table on the cache sizes on different devices, including desktop for comparison. Persistent cache means cache that survives a browser process restart, while memory cache is caching within a browsing session:

Cache size for desktop browsers (in MB)

* Safari on windows demonstrated no persistent cache, while on Mac it stored 100MB of data

UPDATE: We couldn’t reproduce this with the beta version of Safari 5.1, will update the table once its released

** We stopped measuring at 150MB, IE9 can reportedly go up to 250MB

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