12-21-2004, 01:59 AM
As far as my understanding goes, you have to differentiate between pipelining and the maximum number of open HTTP connections per server.
Mithrandir's post only mentioned pipelining settings. Changing these is perfectly ok. HTTP 1.1 servers are supposed to support pipelining. What DeeBye had read about were the settings that control the maximum number of simultaneous connections per server. These are another matter. Increasing them is considered evil by some.
Pipelinig is controlled by the settings Mithrandir mentioned. The 'evil' maximum connections are controlled by the settings named 'network.http.max-*' in 'about:config'
According to RFC 2616, you are not supposed to open any more than 2 simultaneous connections to any HTTP 1.1 server. The RFC says 'SHOULD NOT', not 'MUST NOT', so there is some room for interpretation. Personally, I would recommend not increasing the network.http.max settings. If you increase them, you are basically improving your performance at the cost of those clients that act in compliance with the RFC recommendation. That does not seem like a nice idea to me. Also, web servers usually spawn a new child process for every new connection. This means that if alot of clients ignore the RFC recommendation, this can potentially put web servers under very heavy load. This is what the original poster in the MozillaZine thread Lochnar mentioned warned about:
So *if* you decide to fool with the max connection settings, set them to something like 4 or maybe 8, not to 100.
BTW: Either FF 1.0 uses the 'evil' settings by default, or it is my Linux distribution that does. I just decreased the max connections per server/proxy down to 2 :)
Mithrandir's post only mentioned pipelining settings. Changing these is perfectly ok. HTTP 1.1 servers are supposed to support pipelining. What DeeBye had read about were the settings that control the maximum number of simultaneous connections per server. These are another matter. Increasing them is considered evil by some.
Pipelinig is controlled by the settings Mithrandir mentioned. The 'evil' maximum connections are controlled by the settings named 'network.http.max-*' in 'about:config'
According to RFC 2616, you are not supposed to open any more than 2 simultaneous connections to any HTTP 1.1 server. The RFC says 'SHOULD NOT', not 'MUST NOT', so there is some room for interpretation. Personally, I would recommend not increasing the network.http.max settings. If you increase them, you are basically improving your performance at the cost of those clients that act in compliance with the RFC recommendation. That does not seem like a nice idea to me. Also, web servers usually spawn a new child process for every new connection. This means that if alot of clients ignore the RFC recommendation, this can potentially put web servers under very heavy load. This is what the original poster in the MozillaZine thread Lochnar mentioned warned about:
Quote:These options control the number of opened HTTP connections. If you raise them, do it reasonably. Changes like these are at least partly responsible for the infamous /. effect.
So *if* you decide to fool with the max connection settings, set them to something like 4 or maybe 8, not to 100.
BTW: Either FF 1.0 uses the 'evil' settings by default, or it is my Linux distribution that does. I just decreased the max connections per server/proxy down to 2 :)