How many concurrent AJAX (XmlHttpRequest) requests are allowed in popular browsers?

Question

In Firefox 3, the answer is 6 per domain: as soon as a 7th XmlHttpRequest (on any tab) to the same domain is fired, it is queued until one of the other 6 finish.

Wha

Answer 1

I just checked with www.browserscope.org and with IE9 and Chrome 24 you can have 6 concurrent connections to a single domain, and up to 17 to multiple ones.

Answer 2

I believe there is a maximum number of concurrent http requests that browsers will make to the same domain, which is in the order of 4-8 requests depending on the user's settings and browser.

You could set up your requests to go to different domains, which may or may not be feasible. The Yahoo guys did a lot of research in this area, which you can read about (here). Remember that every new domain you add also requires a DNS lookup. The YSlow guys recommend between 2 and 4 domains to achieve a good compromise between parallel requests and DNS lookups, although this is focusing on the page's loading time, not subsequent AJAX requests.

Can I ask why you want to make so many requests? There is good reasons for the browsers limiting the number of requests to the same domain. You will be better off bundling requests if possible.