multithreading - Aynchronous web server calls in Silverlight and maximum HTTP connections

Question

I've read that Silverlight 2.0 imposes by design an asynchronous model when communicating with the web server. I haven't had a chance to experiment with Silverlight, but I assume that it uses a thread-pool to manage threads like in the .NET Framework.

Now, since some browsers, most notably Internet Explorer, have an hard-coded limit of maximum two concurrent HTTP connections that can be made on the web server, what happens if I make a bunch of asynchronous requests from Silverlight?

Does Silverlight bypass this limitation in the web browser and open as many HTTP connections as there are threads available, or do the asynchronous requests queue up and wait for one of the two connections to become available?

Answer 1

In IE (haven't tested others) Silverlight is restricted to 2 connections at a time.

The behavior in Silverlight is to simply not make the request. So if you make 5 Async web service requests right in a row, the first 2 will happen, the other three won't. No exception is thrown that i've seen...

Fiddler is a big help here :)