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I've recently read in Steve Sounders book "Even Faster Web Sites" that we can increase the number of objects that older browsers like IE6 and 7 to download more than 2 objects at a time from a site by downgrading to http/1.0. Because this is only for specific sites that serve static content I'm happy to do this, however I cannot see a way of force IIS6 to downgrade the responses to http/1.0. Has anyone else managed to do this?

Cheers

1 Answers1

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That's a crappy way to solve the problem.

While MSIE cheats a lot of the time regarding protocol level, a lot of the changes between 1.0 and 1.1 were to do with improving caching - read the book more carefully. A better way to solve the problem is to use wildcard domains with HTTP/1.1 then either manually or via javascript amend the URLs of referenced content to distribute the load.

C.

symcbean
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  • We are already using domain sharding for static content, but because approx. 40% of our users are running IE7 and we have many pages with over 200 images I want to increase the number of concurrent downloads for those users. After domain sharding the next option to increase the number of concurrent downloads for older browsers is to downgrade to http/1.0, obviously this only makes sense for static domains, which is the reason for my question. Unless you have another solution? –  Jul 21 '10 at 06:16
  • Like I suggested, use an inline javascript to rewrite the host name - note you should use a hash of the default URL rather than a random number so that the url remains consistent (and is therefore fetched from the cache rather than a new vhost). – symcbean Jul 21 '10 at 09:55