RedOut
02-22-2005, 04:53 PM
Recently I've had some issues on my webserver, experiencing too much load without a significant traffic increase. And I must say Rimuhosting has been great at helping out with the problem. They found a fix very quickly, when I was just beating my head against a brick wall.
But then I got to thinking about the problem and doing a bit of a post mortem, when I came across a post in a forum I frequent about Firefox pipelining. I've seen it before, and it struck me then as kind of a greedy modification. Basically, you increase the number of simotameous requests to the webserver, which results in a (slightly) better load time. This post suggested that everyone set their requests to 50 (!), which seems just ridiculously high to me. The post also implied more is simply better, a common attitude in a lot of ways today.
This got me thinking, could this change be part of my problem? Possibly. I've seen a large increase in Firefox users this month, and during the times of most stress saw log entries for primarily that browser, I talked with a couple of the users I recognized by IP and yes, they had implemented pipelining with requests set on the order of 30-50. It'd be an odd coincidence if I didn't see a spike in httpd threads at this time.
Now, before I get flamed, I'm not villanizing firefox by implying it caused undue load. I like firefox, quite a bit, and use it myself almost exclusively anymore. What I am concerned with is that by allowing the user free control over this pipelining setting, they're allowing people who don't really understand what they're doing to make a lot more requests at a time than they really need to.
Thoughts? Am I crazy, Is more always better?
But then I got to thinking about the problem and doing a bit of a post mortem, when I came across a post in a forum I frequent about Firefox pipelining. I've seen it before, and it struck me then as kind of a greedy modification. Basically, you increase the number of simotameous requests to the webserver, which results in a (slightly) better load time. This post suggested that everyone set their requests to 50 (!), which seems just ridiculously high to me. The post also implied more is simply better, a common attitude in a lot of ways today.
This got me thinking, could this change be part of my problem? Possibly. I've seen a large increase in Firefox users this month, and during the times of most stress saw log entries for primarily that browser, I talked with a couple of the users I recognized by IP and yes, they had implemented pipelining with requests set on the order of 30-50. It'd be an odd coincidence if I didn't see a spike in httpd threads at this time.
Now, before I get flamed, I'm not villanizing firefox by implying it caused undue load. I like firefox, quite a bit, and use it myself almost exclusively anymore. What I am concerned with is that by allowing the user free control over this pipelining setting, they're allowing people who don't really understand what they're doing to make a lot more requests at a time than they really need to.
Thoughts? Am I crazy, Is more always better?