HTTP Connection Limits

Gavin blogs about how to circumvent the two connection limit in IE. RFC 2068 mandates this limit in the HTTP 1.1 specification.

If you are calling web services in .NET, or using the WebRequest or WebClient classes, you'll also run into this connection limit, which can really throttle applications using an application server through web services. Fortunately, you change the connection limit in a config file:

<connectionManagement>
    <add address="*" maxconnection="2">
    <add address="65.53.32.230" maxconnection="12">
</connectionManagement>

For more information, see one of the following:

PRB: Contention, Poor Performance, and Deadlocks When You Make Web Service Requests from ASP.NET Applications

At Your Service: Performance Considerations for Making Web Service Calls from ASPX Pages