Yes, it can, but many/most proxies do not do this in practice, because
of pipelining bugs in servers (if they get responses out of order,
it's a bad security problem) and because you don't know how long the
first response will take before the second will start coming back.
It's more common IME for proxies to reuse idle connections left over
from other clients.
Hope this helps,
P.S., Questions like this are appropriate for the HTTPbis list;
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/On 19/03/2009, at 8:45 AM, Magnus Henoch wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm writing an HTTP proxy. Thus I'm thinking about an interesting
> protocol question: if two clients each send a request through the same
> proxy to the same origin server, is the proxy allowed to open a single
> connection to the origin server, and forward the two requests by
> pipelining? I imagine that a server might consider the two requests
> to
> come from the same client, as they arrived by the same connection.
>
> As far as I can tell from the HTTP 1.1 spec, a server may not make
> such
> an assumption. Is that correct? Are there examples of servers that
> do
> that anyway?
>
> --
> Magnus Henoch,
magnus@...
> Erlang Training and Consulting
>
http://www.erlang-consulting.com/>
>
>
--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/
