IE 5 breaks TCP standard to get speed

fast with IIS server - slow with all others

[tedster]

Here's an article about the way Internet Explorer 5 breaks the TCP standard in order to speed up IIS connections (and slow down connections to other servers. It explained a lot of troubles one of my client was having with streaming RealVideo.

The author wasn't sure if this was fixed in IE6.

In other words, the connection is kept "half- open" on the server end. The reason for this? Why, to make subsequent connections from IE clients faster...

But IE to non-IIS servers waste a packet at the beginning of each request-- and depending on how the server handles that illegal request, it might immediately RST it, or it might just time out... which would make the browser seem infuriatingly slow to connect to new websites.

The Full Article [grotto11.com]

[andreasfriedrich]

Interesting find tedster. But at the end of the entry there is this update:

As it turned out, it was actually the NT stack that was causing this to happen -- it didn't matter what client or server software you used.

Andreas

[tedster]

Well that will teach me to read more closely! My clients are on NT4, so it still helps them understand some issues they're having.