ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area firefox web browser

I agree with SolarPowered regarding "Necessity is the mother of invention." Thus the web server I am designing (a high performance application framework), actually detects excess connections and is capable of intentionally stalling, or even dropping, the excess (as specified by settings in the configuration).

But jooles is right. If you demand more than a reasonable fair share, the webmaster (or the server logic) can detect this and can do something about it. I've had to do this before, myself, and know some other people who have. I've also architected a 300+ web server farm that had to contend with these issues.

Web servers vary by capacity. I don't expect ECN to be anywhere near the capacity of EBAY, for example. Making 30 extra HTTP connections to EBAY may go unnoticed (and likely spread across 30 of the 100's of huge web servers they have). But on ECN and many other web sites, they probably all hit the same server.

HTTP 1.1 does support persistent connections allowing multiple requests per connection. When one is done, another can be sent over the same connection. Additionally, when there are more connections, there is more of a packet flood when they initially start flowing. That can result in short term congestion, some degree of packet loss that has to be restarted (after having used the bandwidth for no value), and possible congestion limiting flow control. A maximum of 4 connections is very reasonable for a website like ECN. I recommend not more than 8. If you see a significant difference between 4 and 8 across most web sites, you need to investigate other issues, such as your ISP losing a percentage of your packets.

SolarPowerd:

So why not take something that exists, like Linux (if GPL is OK for your project), or NetBSD (if GPL would not work for you), and put your own networking logic in there that can handle 100's of concurrent connections from 100's of concurrent users at the same time. Most of the drivers for most common PC devices are already done there for you (though I suppose you might want to tweak the network card drivers). Both have plenty of available applications, support X Windows, and can run Firefox, Apache, and many others.

jooles,

Bob Metcalf was of course at Xerox, invented Ethernet, and did or was highly involved with the implemention of the first 3 megabit Ethernet prototype at Xerox. Shortly thereafter the DIX or XID (take your pick) consortium was formed. I was part of the group at Intel. Bob Beach at Intel actually wrote the spec--that's his pseudo-Pascal defining the protocol that's still in the IEEE 802.3 spec to this day. I met Bob Metcalf, and worked with him a small bit in the DIX meetings. That was a quarter century ago (!!!); I don't think I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street today.

The first official standard was the DEC/Intel/Xerox "Blue Book." IEEE later picked it up and made an IEEE standard out of it. (Well, "picked it up" isn't quite how it happened; the politics involved were quite amazing, with IBM trying to kill off Ethernet because the official bussiness network standard had to be an IBM creation. Hence token ring...)

I don't really have a favorite OS, (other than the ones I've written ). I moved out of networking into other things over the years, and haven't spent much time looking over the various OS's out there. I do chip design now (I do happen to have a 10/100/1000 Ethernet IP core available ), and since all my tools run on Windows, I use Windows.

pdh, that's actually a really good idea. As you managed to read between the lines in my last post, a couple years ago I did embark on an effort to see what it would take to productize some of the OS/networking technology I have around. And as I said, I found that the scope of the driver support problem was just too, too big. I did look at whether there is a way to support either Windows or Linux device drivers in their native form, but one would have to clone a major portion of Windows or Linux to do that, which kind of defeats the purpose. I hadn't looked at grafting my stuff onto Linux. That might work, or it might not. At the moment, I'm deep into other things, but I might take a look at that if I move back in that direction.

jooles, that article looks quite interesting. I'll take a look at it when I have a bit more time. Thanks

--Solar




[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 05-04-2005).]

Jools wrote "Well, they will change all the wiring when I start doing this because necessity is the mother of invention?"

Yes, as a matter of fact, that's how our electrical distribution systems have grown and evolved over the years. The need causes the evolution.

Yeah Russ,
I've been using Firefox for a wee while now.
Can't find much wrong with it and I find it a lot easier to use than IE6.
I like the fact that it has it's own Pop-up blocker "on-board".

Russ,
There is a thread down in the Computers and Internet Area, that I posted a while ago about the Firefox browser.
Here it is right here .

Thanks Trumpy:
Been so busy lately, I haven't had much time for the internet.
Between construction work, inspections and umpiring baseball games, it's pretty hectic.

Just the way I like it !