757621 - Increase max HTTP connection limit on mobile

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Jason Duell]

Are we still sure 6 is the best limit for total simultaneous HTTP connections on mobile?

  android/app/mobile.js:pref("network.http.max-connections", 6);

Would be nice to have a higher limit if/when it's performant--I imagine it'd make a significant difference for many sites.

Is this also the B2G limit, or does that live somewhere else?

I believe Patrick came up with this number, so assigning to him, mainly as a reminder in case this needs to be revisited.  Feel free to mark WORKSFORME if you still think this is the right limit, Patrick.

Comment 1

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Some comparisons:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/09/21/making-a-mobile-connection/

This post says that Android stock browser uses:

"Android 2.2 has a max of only 4 HTTP connections which limits parallel downloads. (This was increased to 8 in Android 2.3 and 35 in Android 3.1"

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

More data here:
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2008/03/20/roundup-on-parallel-connections/

Comment 3

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

my next step here will be something more subtle than just increasing the parallel connection count. increased parallelism helps cover up latency, which is good - but it also obscures our ability to schedule our most important resources on the bandwdith.. e.g. the js and css are slowed down by the large images sharing the small pipe simultaneously which is very very bad. I think we just learned something from some google spdy data that will help inform that algorithm.

given that, I'm going to wontfix this particular bug.