Re: Summing up the Icebreak discussion

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the interests of trying to help clear up the vagueness, here's a good 
discussion of the MaxClients directive.  It's Perl oriented, but Perl's 
been around for a long time and the Perl folks know a lot about this stuff.

http://modperlbook.org/html/11-1-Setting-the-MaxClients-Directive.html

It's never cut and dried.  A single session can have lots of 
connections.  Just think of a web page with lots of images.  Each image 
can be given it's own connection and all of them can be fired off and 
share the bandwidth (which is why you'll see multiple images slowly 
getting painted).

The MaxClients configures how many threads or processes are spawned by 
the server to handle concurrent requests.  What does this mean?  What is 
the lifespan of the thread/process?  Does a single thread/process server 
an entire persistent session?  What happens if a persistent session also 
wants to request images (logos, buttons, whatever)?  Does the browser 
create more connections for those?  Are they persistent or non-persistent?

I just haven't had the time to do the research on all of these. If 
anyone knows any definitive answers, I'd love to hear them.

Joe