Does anyone know how to make IE allow more than 2 downloads at a time? (Other than using a d/l manager)

Yeah, open up multiple IE windows to the same site and begin two downloads from each of those windows. At least that worked for me if I recall correctly.

Doh... was hoping for a registry hack.

Figures... After 30 minutes of lookng, I finally found it, 2 minutes after I posted the question. Here

huh, that Q article makes me laugh - to wit:

In reply to:

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This procedure is for informational purposes only. Changing the maximum number of connections beyond two is a violation of Internet standards; Microsoft does not recommended this procedure for use outside closed networks.

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Since when did Microsoft give a f_ck about anyone elses "Internet Standards"?!

Tell me.

Since when did Microsoft give a f_ck about anyone elses "Internet Standards"?!

Heh. Who said they were someone else's standards?

Oh wait, what am I saying, even that argument doesn't hold water. They don't even follow their own standards.

Heh. Who said they were someone else's standards?

RFC2616, section 8.1.4:

Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of
simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A
single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with
any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to
another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously
active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response
times and avoid congestion.

i find it so funny how they can comply with one standard, but not another.

i find it so funny how they can comply with one standard, but not another.

That article was all born of some kind of misunderstanding, though; when it was on Slashdot none of the TCP gnomes who tried to reproduce it saw anything remotely similar.

Peter

The only reason I want more than 2 is that I frequently download from more than 1 server at a time. And since my end is RARELY the bottleneck....

TCP gnomes

What's color is a TCP gnome? How tall are they?

That article was all born of some kind of misunderstanding, though; when it was on Slashdot none of the TCP gnomes who tried to reproduce it saw anything remotely similar.

yeah, they commented about that on the bottom of the page.

UPDATE: Since this post got Slashdotted, I've been getting a pretty fair amount of e-mail, suggesting that the behavior we observed here might be anything from T/TCP to HTTP/1.1 pipelining to delirium tremens. Well, I should point out that this phenomenon was something we observed in 1997, before HTTP/1.1 was in wide use; both the client and server were using vanilla HTTP/1.0. As it turned out, it was actually the NT stack that was causing this to happen-- it didn't matter what client or server software you used. It even happened with our home-grown network test tools.

It's entirely possible that Microsoft has changed the NT stack in recent iterations so that this doesn't happen anymore. But if you're trying to reproduce the behavior, use NT 4.0 machines for worst results.