HTTP Handshake Overhead

The HTTP handshake overhead is the time and resource cost incurred during the establishment of a TCP connection and subsequent TLS negotiation before any application data is transferred. In the context of financial APIs, this process must be repeated for every REST request unless persistent connections are utilized.

This latency accumulation can be significant when a trading algorithm needs to query market data hundreds of times per second. By contrast, WebSockets perform the handshake once, allowing subsequent data exchange to occur with minimal latency.

Reducing this overhead is a key focus for developers optimizing high-frequency trading infrastructure to ensure competitive execution.

Competitive Liquidity Strategy
OS Overhead Reduction
Emergency Response Protocol
Informed Trader Detection
Heat Dissipation Engineering
Data Alignment Penalties
Asset Storage Costs
Transistor Density Limits