Using a VPN Clobbers IE 8 Performance

December 12th, 2009 - 1:46PM

A significant change in IE 8 was the increase in the number of active connections per hostname from two to six. This allowed pages with many embedded resources (e.g. images, CSS or JavaScript) to be loaded much more quickly because more requests could be executed in parallel; reducing queuing and the amount of Blocked time seen in HttpWatch: Recently, we noticed that IE 8 sometimes reverts back to the earlier limit of two connections per hostname. The connectivity enhancements in IE 8 are documented as requiring broadband connections: But we were seeing the number of active connections being reduced over … Continue reading →