[5] Byte serving can also be used by multihomed clients to simultaneously download a resource over multiple network interfaces.
[6] To achieve this type of application-layer link aggregation, multiple HTTP sessions are established and logical file segments are collaboratively downloaded from the server and reassembled at the client.
[7] It is often used when a server does not know exactly how much data there will be in the total response, allowing the server to start sending data to the client straight away without having to buffer the response and determine the exact length before it begins sending it to the client.
This improves latency and reduces memory requirements while preserving the ability to reuse the connection after the response is completed.
Later versions of the HTTP protocol continue to support byte serving,[8] though the use of chunked transfer encoding is superseded by alternative methods.