Controlling how many files are sent in parallel to browser

how many files are sent at the same time from apache

[mikecouk]

We've just had our site analysed by a 3rd party company, and their performance graphs suggest that apache is only ever sending 2 files back to the browser at any one time, before it then sends another 2.
Does anyone know what the default is, and if it's changeable or not, I've not come across this kind of setting before.
We're running apache 2.0.4x on sparc solaris 9, using modcache, modrewrite, and reverse proxying, with keepalive off, and a worker MPM ;

ThreadLimit 128
ServerLimit 32
StartServers 16
MaxClients 4096
MinSpareThreads 10
MaxSpareThreads 30
ThreadsPerChild 128
MaxRequestsPerChild 20000

Mike

[motorhaven]

This is not controlled by Apache. It is up to the browser to determine how many simultaineous transfers it requests. There are Apache bandwidth modules that can be installed that can limit the number of connections from a single IP, but they can't force (or even request) that a browser use more than 1 connection.

[mikecouk]

ahhh that makes perfect sense. But what would you generally find sites doing on average, lets say explorer 6 connecting to an apache 2.x website, once it's got the index.html for example, would it request all the images at once, one at a time?

Mike

[motorhaven]

I can't tell you what sites do on average... its all on the client (browser side). Generally, since HTTP 1.1 came out (allows a browser to reuse the same connection) browsers don't more than a couple of connections at once.

[jdMorgan]

The Mozilla family of browsers even makes this user-configurable. For some example connection numbers, see the link to the Mozilla discussion of the adjustable parameters in this recent Firefox thread [webmasterworld.com].

Jim