[thelist] Spreading sites between different hosts

[Anthony Baratta]

Peter Small wrote:
> 
> How is this streaming improved by the ten gifs being on the same server as
> the Web page? Wouldn't the same streaming limitations apply - because the
> limitations are in the browser on the client side?
> 
> Sorry if these are naive questions, but, the technical aspects of Web
> communication and file transfer is a big black fog to me.

I'm not intimate with how exactly the browser talks to the server. But I do notice
the difference on those commercial sites that have a ton of ads (presumably served by
several different ad servers) versus those that have only a single server processing
the page. Take a typical ZD Net site for instance.

Scenario One - Browser opens up four streams for each server. You are going to be
severely limited by the client's connection speed. More connections to more servers
will choke the client's connection.

Scenario Two - Browser only has 4 connection streams total.  Shouldn't be any faster
or slower versus a single server. There maybe a slight hit each time the browser has
to talk to a "new" server - but it shouldn't be that noticable. 

My guess is that most of the differnce will be on how the browser parses the HTML and
decides to structure the communication setups with all the different servers.
Something you have absolutely no control over.

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Anthony Baratta
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