OT: How to tell an HTTP client to limit parallel connections?

[donarb]

On Friday, November 8, 2013 9:25:30 AM UTC-8, Grant Edwards wrote:
> Yes, this off-topic, but after a fair amount of Googling and searching
> in the "right" places, I'm running out of ideas.
> 
> I've got a very feeble web server.  The crypto handshaking involved in
> opening an https: connection takes 2-3 seconds.  That would be fine if
> a browser opened a single connection and then sent a series of
> requests on that connection to load the various elements on a page.
> 
> But that's not what browsers do.  They all seem to open whole handful
> of connections (often as many as 8-10) and try to load all the page's
> elements in parallel.  That turns what would be a 3-4 second page load
> time (using a single connection) into a 20-30 second page load time.
> Even with plaintext http: connections, the multi-connection page load
> time is slower than the single-connection load time, but not by as
> large a factor.
> 
> Some browsers have user-preference settings that limit the max number
> of simultaneous connections to a single server (IIRC the RFCs suggest
> a max of 4, but most browsers seem to default to a max of 8-16).
> 
> What I really need is an HTTP header or meta-tag or something that I
> can use to tell clients to limit themselves to a single connection.
> 
> I haven't been able to find such a thing, but I'm hoping I've
> overlooked something...
> 

There's an Apache module called mod_limitipconn that does just what you are asking. I've never used it and can't vouch for it. I'm not aware of anything like this for other servers like Nginx.

http://dominia.org/djao/limitipconn2.html