Network.http.request.max-start-delay

From MozillaZine Knowledge Base

The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. The correct title is network.http.request.max-start-delay.

This article describes the preference network.http.request.max-start-delay. To add, delete, or modify this preference, you will need to edit your configuration — do not edit this article.

1 Background
2 Possible values and their effects
3 Caveats
4 First checked in
5 Has an effect in
6 Related bugs
7 Related preferences

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Background

HTTP is the application-layer protocol that most web pages are transferred with. HTTP keep-alive connections can be re-used for multiple requests, as opposed to non-keep-alive connections, which are limited to one request. The preferences network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server and network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy define the maximum number of keep-alive connections that can be open at one time. This can cause a problem - if the keep-alive connections made are long-lived connections (large downloads), then short-lived connections won't be allowed to connect because the maximum number has already been reached. The solution is to allow the maximum number of keep-alive connections to be exceeded after a certain period of time. This preference controls that amount of time.

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Possible values and their effects

Number of seconds keep-alive connections must wait before they are allowed to exceed the maximum. (Default: 10)

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Caveats

Even though this preference allows the maximum number of keep-alive connections to be exceeded, it doesn't allow exceeding the maximum number of connections of any type to a particular server or in total.
network.http.keep-alive (if you don't have a proxy) or network.http.proxy.keep-alive (if you have a proxy) must be set to true for this preference to take effect.

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