Greg Stein - 2000-06-17

This paper might be interesting to some readers. It discusses some of the network costs and benefits to using HTTP. Some of it is very tied to HTML pages, but it also goes into detail about HTTP's use of the network -- connections used, packets transferred, average packet size, latency, etc.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Performance/Pipeline.html

Again, it is interesting to note that a lot of the details regarding how to improve network performance has been handled already by Apache. There is a lot to be said for that over the naive server's use of send() to a socket.
[ note this isn't specific to Apache; I have to imagine Zeus and some of the high-perf servers out there have also dealt with some of the nuances of packet delivery ]