On Sat, Feb 07, 1998 at 11:52:02PM -0700, Marc Slemko wrote:
Yet even with this, there is a perceived value to multiple connections. Why is that? There are several reasons:
- that is how it has been done, so we better keep doing it - can grab more bandwidth on congested links by using more flows. In real life, this is a significant factor, more so when you get to ISDN and higher speeds. It would probably be better for everyone if everyone stopped using multiple connections, but if some do and some don't, those that don't lose out. This advantage could be eliminated by various algorithms. - is not acceptable to have a bunch of small responses stuck behind one huge response. - if you are a proxy, this becomes even more critical. If you only use one connection to each origin server, if one client requests a huge document from that server, anyone else wanting to make requests to that server would have to wait for the transfer to finish.
And yet, and yet... Marc overlooks the most important reason why browsers make multiple connections: functionally, this gets the page _usable_ by the user (which is, after all the _point_ of the whole affair) more quickly. Given the current design environment of web pages, it is useful to have more than one image loading simultaneously, because some of those images are controls, not just pretty pictures, and if you can whip the small stuff up while the big stuff is still loading, that's a win. Everyone remember: the whole point is making the net usable for the users. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com