You're way off about the merits of pipelining. As far as parallel requests are concerned, the 9P protocol beats HTTP hands down (as does basically any other request response protocol), because it has explicit unique IDs on the requests and responses. That allows a server to respond to two requests in an order different than their arrival order. If you send an expensive HTTP request followed by a cheap one, the server can't tell you the cheap answer until it has told you the expensive answer.
The word "pipelining" means "we forgot to put request and response IDs into the protocol so we kludged it in by requiring responses to happen in the same order as requests." If a protocol says it has pipelining, that's always a bad sign. Russ
