Million dollar bug

Dutch programmer Jacques Matthey (Jacques Mattheij) is the owner of the site ww.com and one of the first people who organized live broadcasts from webcams on the Internet. He draws attention to a bug in HTTP , thanks to which you can significantly speed up the work of many web applications and ordinary websites.

HTTP ( RFC 1945 ) is formally a synchronous protocol. The standard clearly states that an HTTP response can only be sent after receiving the corresponding HTTP request. In practice, everything works differently.

This topic was discussed a couple of years ago on the StackOverflow forum. Indeed, the site can send an HTTP response earlier than it received the request.

Jacques Matti writes that due to the exploitation of this bug many years ago he managed to increase the frame rate a dozen times during webcam broadcasts. If you follow the HTTP specifications, the transfer rate was around 1 FPS, but when using asynchronous mode, it managed to increase the speed to 15 FPS. All browsers work fine in asynchronous mode, breaking specifications and accepting a response from the site before sending a request.
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Jacques says that he is still nervous every time new versions of the browser are released, but in vain: browsers continue to work around the specifications. Moreover, the new standard SPDY can legitimize this mode of operation.

PS Matti earned more than one million dollars using this bug, which he discovered before competitors.