question on the inner workings of ktor: if you make a request and then another identical request whilst the first one is still awaiting a response does the second request also await the outcome of the first request or does it generate another network round trip?

I'd imagine that by default those would be treated as two separate requests. I'm guessing you would need some sort of caching mechanism in the pipeline to only make single request.

By caching mechanism do you mean just adding the HttpCache plugin?

unsure what that plugin does, guessing no but check docs

Nothing in docs

so probably not

If an endpoint allows caching its responses then you can use the

HttpCache

plugin to cache a response from the first request and have it for the second one without making a network call. However, this depends on when the second request is fired.