785586 - FF prefers keeping connections to establishing new ones.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[dE]

If you've limited network.http.max-connections, network.http.max-connections-per-server and network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server and opened a new pages (connections to new servers) after all other pages have done loading, FF prefers keeping existing connections instead of dropping them (i.e. the old onces) and connecting to the new server which the user just desired.

The result -- After all pages have been loaded (and number of connections established =  network.http.max-connections) and you open a new page for loading, FF will make no attempts to connect to the new server, instead wait for existing connections to timeout (defaults to 120 seconds). 

I suggest the old connections to be terminated in favours of new connections being established.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

keeping connections is usually faster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection

Comment 2

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

dE - we need a better set of instructions to reproduce. Can you do it with the default preferences? That has a lot to do with priority.

The algorithm says that if FF cannot open a necessary new connection because of connection limits it will try and prune 1 idle connection and then try and make the new connection again. It sounds like that isn't the behavior you are seeing - but that code gets exercised all the time.

Comment 3

[dE]

This's practically impossible to reproduce with default preferences (it can establish 200 connections at a time) and as of the current time, I can't reproduce it when there're already 4 TCP connections (and network.http.max-connections is set to 4) established, but the problem does occur with limited network.http.max-connections under elongated browsing sessions.

If something I could report when the problem when it occurs....

Comment 4

[dE]

(In reply to Matthias Versen (Matti) from comment #1)
> keeping connections is usually faster
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection

Oh yes, I forgot the respond, sorry.

Apparently it's more of a headache when you Internet speed is less than dialup (and that's why I opted to reduce it down).

Comment 5

[dE]

For the record, now this works as expected.