260860 - Multiple downloads halts all other browsing activity

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Michael Berg]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

With four simultaneous downloads all other browsing activity is disabled. One
cannot open a web page in a new tab, one cannot launch a new Firefox browser and
open a page there. EVERYTHING is stalled until at least one of the four
downloads is completed.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Find any web page with four large files you can download (large because it
illustrates the problem better).
2. Right click on each downloadable file and from the popup menu select Save
Link As. Save the file anywhere on the local harddisk. Repeat with four links to
initiate four simultaneous downloads.

Actual Results:  
While the four files are downloading, attempt to open any web page. This will
not work - rather the browser appears to be waiting for one of the downloads to
complete. In effect you can't do anything. Perhaps launch Internet Explorer to
continue browsing - that's what I have been forced to do so far.


Expected Results:  
There is no need to impose this restriction on the user. Browsing should be
possible with 4 simultaneous downloads.



According to one of the specs of the Http standard (if memory serves me right),
there is a guideline that says that any http client should not initiate more
than four simultaneous requests to any one single http server.

If Firefox is attempting to adhere to this standard one can make two remarks.

First of all Firefox is doing it incorrectly, since it blocks http requests to
*any* http server, not just to the server that is receiving those 4 simultaneous
requests.

Secondly, this guideline clearly dates back to the days of modem based web
servers and one can safely say that no such rule need to be imposed in the
modern internet infrastructure. It should at the very least be configurable, and
the default should be higher than 4 (10+).

My suggestion is to completely remove any limitations on the number of
simultaneous requests, since this not only resolves the problem I am reporting
but also makes surfing in general considerably faster (remember, it's not just 4
simultaneous downloads, but 4 simultaneous http requests - this degrades
browsing performance significantly for pages that are heavy on graphics,
javascript, css and other things that are loaded up along with the html document).

I think it's quite a big deal that Firefox locks me out of the web because it
can't handle 4+ simultaneous http requests - hence the Major severity code.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.