Why doesn't Chrome reuse websocket connections across tabs?

[iychche]

I am going through the article on Chrome internals here and my understanding is:

1. The Chrome kernel process has the networking stack which is common for all render processes
2. Before establishing a new connection, Chrome first checks if an open connection already exists as identified by {scheme, host, port}. 

I have a Websocket application that I access using wss://eventing.com/events. Each tab establishes a connection to that backend. However, given my understanding above, shouldn't I only see one connection that is shared between all tabs? What am I missing?

Thanks.

[Reilly Grant]

While normal HTTP requests can be sent over a single TCP (or QUIC) connection once a connection is being used for a WebSocket it consumes the entire connection. Conceptually, it is a single HTTP request which never ends. So that connection can't be reused. If WebSockets were supported over QUIC then theoretically a single QUIC connection could multiplex multiple WebSocket connections but that hasn't been implemented. If you want to share a single WebSocket between multiple tabs then I recommend having one tab own the connection and use BroadcastChannel to communicate events to the other tabs. 

Reilly Grant | Software Engineer | rei...@chromium.org | Google Chrome

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[Adam Rice]

If you use WebSocket over HTTP/2 it should be possible for multiple WebSocket connections to share a single HTTP/2 connection, however this will only happen if there is an existing HTTP/2 connection to the destination host to start with (and the destination host must support WS/H2, obviously).

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