A reasonable number of simultaneous, asynchronous ajax requests

Question

I'm wondering what the consensus is on how many simultaneous asynchronous ajax requests is generally allowable.

The reason I ask, is I'm working on a personal web app. For the most part I keep my requests down to one. However there are a few situations where I send up to 4 requests simultaneously. This causes a bit of delay, as the browser will only handle 2 at a time.

The delay is not a problem in terms of useability, for now. And it'll be awhile before I have to worry about scalability, if ever. But I am trying to adhere to best practices, as much as is reasonable. What are your thoughts? Is 4 requests a reasonable number?

Thanks for the advice

Answer 1

That really depends on if it works like that properly. If the logic of the application is built that 4 simultaneos requests make sense, do it like this. If the logic isn't disturbed by packing multiple requests into one request you can do that, but only if it won't make the code more complicated. Keep it as simple and straight forward until you have problems, then you can start to optimize.

But you can ask yourself if the design of the app can be improved that there is no need for multiple requests.

Also check it on a really slow connection. Simultaneous http requests are not necessarily executed on the server in the proper order and they might also return in a different order. That might give problems you'll experience only on slower lines.

Answer 2

It's tough to answer without knowing some details. If you're just firing the requests and forgetting about them, then 4 requests could be fine, as could 20 - as long as the user experience isn't harmed by slow performance. But if you have to collect information back from the service, then coordinating those responses could get tricky. That may be something to consider.

The previous answer from Christian has a good point - check it on a slow connection. Fiddler can help with that as it allows you to test slow connections by simulating different connection speeds (56K and up).

You could also consider firing a single async request that could contain one or more messages to a controlling service, which could then hand the messages off to the appropriate services, collect the results and then return back to the client. Having multiple async requests being fired and then returning at different times could present a choppy experience for the user as each response is then rendered on the page at different times.

Answer 3

I'm not an expert in networking, but probably four wouldn't be much of a problem for a small to medium application, however, the larger it gets the higher the server load which could eventually cause problems. This really doesn't answer your questions, but here is a suggestion. If delay is not a problem why don't you use an queue.

var request = []//a queue of the requests to be sent to the server

request[request.length] = //whatever you want to send to the server
startSend();

function startSend(){//if nothing is in the queue go ahead and send this one
  if(request.length===1){
    send();
  }
}

function send(){//the ajax call to the server using the first request in queue
  var sendData = request[0];
  //code to send the data
  //then when you get the response (I can't remember exactly the code for it)
  //send it to a function to process the data
}

function process(data){
  request.splice(0,1);
  if(request.length>0){//check to see if you need to do another ajax call
    send();
  }
  //process data
}

This is probably isn't the best way to do it, but that's the idea you could probably modify it to do 2 requests instead of just one. Also, maybe you could modify it to send as many requests as their are in the queue as one request. Then the server splits them up and processes each one and sends the data back. All at once or even as it gets it since the server can flush the data several times. You just have to make sure your are parsing the response text correctly.

Answer 4

In my experience 1 is the best number, but I'll agree there may be some rare situations that might require simultaneous calls.

If I recall, IE is the only browser that still limits connections to 2. This causes your requests to be queue, and if your first 2 requests take longer than expected or timeout, the other two requests will automatically fail. In some cases you also get the annoying "allow script to continue" dialog in IE.

If your user can't really do anything until all 4 requests come back (especially with IE's bogged down JavaScript performance) I would create a transport object that contains the data for all requests and then a returning transport object that can be parsed and delegated on return.

Answer 5

I'm pretty sure the browser limits the number of connections you can have anyway.

If you have Firefox, type in about:config and look for network.http.max-connections-per-server and that will tell you your maximum. I'm almost positive that this will be the limit for AJAX connections as well. I think IE is limited to 2. I'm not sure about Chrome or Opera.