The document provides an overview of the key steps involved in a typical web server transaction to service an HTTP GET request. It outlines the basic operations from initializing the server socket, accepting connections, parsing requests, retrieving and sending response files and headers, and closing connections. It then discusses common optimizations including caching file metadata, descriptors, headers and data in memory to reduce repetitive disk and system calls. Custom OS primitives are proposed to further optimize operations like request acceptance, time retrieval, and sending responses.