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Firefox 3 and its impact on servers particularly those serving static content
Firefox 3 has been released and by all accounts there has been enormous uptake of this fine browser.
If you aren’t familiar with the browser, I would encourage you to visit Deb Richardson’s brilliant Field Guide to Firefox 3 which describes a number of key Firefox 3 features in a very accessible manner.
One thing I would like to mention is that Firefox 3 has improved connection parallelism. The default limit for concurrent connections per hostname has been increased from 2 to 6 which is similar to IE8. Details can be found in this bug report here and for the technically inclined these are the new defaults
pref(“network.http.max-connections”, 30);
pref(“network.http.max-connections-per-server”, 15);
pref(“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server”, 6);
pref(“network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy”, 8);
Whilst the improved connection parallelism is one factor in improved page load performance, web server administrators who are currently serving content via Apache need to factor in increased concurrent connections from Firefox 3 and tweak their MaxClients setting appropiately.
If they are using Apache to serve static content, maybe they should consider switching to lighttpd and nginx for serving such content.
Google’s Steve Souder has a great roundup on Parallel Connections in this blog entry.
Some comments on older posts got deleted
Not sure how this occurred, will see if I can get some of them back via backups. Will have to automate blog backups and keep weekly snapshots
Twitter's use for SMS sending and receiving
Hong Kong is unique in the sense that whilst we have insane mobile penetration of 154.4 %, there is a huge price difference between voice plans and SMS plans.
Depending on a third party long distance provider, it is actually cheaper to call up somebody and speak for a few minutes (HK-US charges are 7 cents/min and an SMS costs at minimum HK$ 2) and convey more than send a SMS to that person
Thus, I find Twitter’s SMS integration very useful. I tell my family members to sign up to Twitter and then also enable their mobile devices. In India, Twitter has a shortcode 5566511.
In HongKong, wifi access is very ubiquitous via the GovWiFi program as well as efforts by FON as well as PCCW, HongKong’s dominant telco provider so hopefully with the upcoming launch of the iPhone in Hong Kong it can help me by allowing me to have access to Twitter
Yusuf Goolamabbas 