> Personally, I think a preferable solution would be to redo the WWW
> protocol so it doesn't keep tearing down connections and creating new
> ones, precisely because connection setup and destruction has high
> overhead.  Slow-start just aggravates this by increasing the effective
> connection-setup overhead.  (To be sure, slow-start has its benefits,
> but they don't kick in in these cases.)

This is called KeepAlive and is supported in the NCSA server and I
believe in the Mosaic browser as well. I quote from the NCSA documentation:

http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/setup/httpd/KeepAlive.html

In normal HTTP transactions, the browser opens up a separate connection to the
server for everything the browser wants. So, if you have a page with 5 inline
images, the browser will use separate connections to get the page and each
inline image. With a browser which supports KeepAlive, the browsers requests
the documents one at a time through the same connection. This eliminates the
start up time and cost of each connection.