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Firefox Network Pipelining
By maurizio | March 31, 2007
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I read John Chow post about a trick he saw on a video and I’d like to answer here about it.
Well..I’ve already answered on the comments on his site, but here I’ll post some useful links I just found about it.
Mozilla.org itself is saying that this is an experimental feature. The interesting fact is that they are telling people to set it to 8. They don’t say that a high number could be annoying for server owners. An interesting note is that you can set that number from 1 to 8. So all the tip you see on internet to set it to 10 are wrong :)
On mozillazine Knowledge Base you can read this:
Higher values will cause a delay before the first request completes but will make the last request complete sooner. Higher values will also cause more of a delay if a connection fails.
They even give you the link to the source file where the maximum value of 8 is set.By reading that code, I see that the maximum number of connection is 24, so if you set 8, you can have only 3 tabs at full speed. The other will have to wait. (never tried “Open all in Tabs of the whole bookmark? :) )
They even give a link to a Pipelining Faq. This is an interesting read because it says that pipelining is actually good for internet, because the request could be sent with less tcp/ip packet, while when you do not pipeline, every request has his own tcp/ip packet. I am not sure that this is 100% correct, because you could easily imagine that there will be connection that doesn’t start at the same time (imagine a site with several images of different sizes)
I have found an article on ApacheWeek speaking about pipelining but server-side. It seems that what I’ve said on John’s blog was wrong.Or maybe I’m too tired and I don’t really understand all. The thing is that all those comment about being banned because of too many connections and stuff is WRONG. The connection http connection is just one with several requests. With the old way you had to connect one time for every request. Imagine an ftp connection. You want to download 4 files. The old way was to login to the ftp server, get a file and logout. Then login again for the second file etc. The pipelining way is to login to the server once, and get the 4 files.
Now please leave a comment on this :)
Topics: Internet |
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March 31st, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Good stuff. Thanks for clarifying. I came herd via John’s blog and am glad to find someone has done some additional research on it.
Shine on,
Aaron
April 1st, 2007 at 8:03 am
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April 10th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
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April 14th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
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April 15th, 2007 at 7:25 am
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April 26th, 2007 at 11:50 am
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