Connection reuse

Smart Shield leverages Cloudflare's optimized infrastructure to package multiple requests from an upper-tier into a single connection to your origin. This means overall connections to your origin are lowered by 30% on average.

About connection reuse

Implemented by HTTP/1.1, connection reuse describes multiple requests passing through one same connection (between one source IP:port and one destination IP:port). It is commonly the case even for simple websites nowadays.

For example, when a connection is initiated for shop.example.com, several embedded subresources may be requested - CSS, image files, advertisement, etc. This can mean hundreds of requests just for the website to load. Instead of having a one to one ratio of request per connection, a single connection is used for multiple requests.

With HTTP/2, requests can use the same connection even if they are for different domains.

For example, a connection initiated for shop.example.com can be used for requests for blog.example.com as well - as long as the requests have the same destination IP:port and the server TLS certificate is authoritative for both hostnames.