Ajax Girl

Ryan Breen has written up a detailed post on Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit in which he discusses the old-fashion limits of 2 connections per HTTP/1.1 per host, and the benefit you get from a simple CNAME hack.

The average load time when using 2 connections is 7.919 seconds. The average load time when using 6 connections is 4.629 seconds. That’s a greater than 40% drop in page load time. This technique will work anywhere that you have a large block of object requests currently served by one host.

There is plenty of precedent for this approach in real world Ajax apps. To exploit connection parallelism, the image tiles at Google Maps are served from mt0.google.com through mt3.google.com. Virtual Earth also uses this technique.

You can also use this connection management approach to sandbox the performance of different parts of your application. If you have page elements that require database access and may be more latent than static objects, keep them from clogging up the 2 connections for image content by putting them on a subdomain. This trick won’t cause a huge improvement in the total load time of your page, but it can significantly improve the perceived performance by allowing static content to load unfettered.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/using-cnames-to-get-around-browser-connection-limits