Recently I’m making a Flash photo gallery for my dad and I’m trying to optimize the loading of many pictures at once.
The question is: how many concurrent download can Flash make?
Google seems to have no answer, so I decided to make a small test to find it out by myself.
So I’ve made an swf that load 4 pictures simultaneously, and the result is in line with the HTTP specifications of max 2 connections per server.
More exactly, Flash use the browser configuration, in Firefox is Network.http.max-connections-per-server in about:config.
Can it be improved?
It is possible to use the old trick of loading images through multiples domain: for example static1.foo.com, static2.foo.com. This increase the maximum connection limit until network.http.max-connections
Default values in Firefox 1.5 are 8 for max-connections-per-server and 24 for max-connections.
You can try it by yourself:
Load from a single domain
Load from two domain
Sources:
Single domain
Two domain
