Limit the number of concurrent connections from the server side?

Question

I'm writing my own webserver and I don't yet handle concurrent connections properly. I get massive page loading lag due to inappropriately handling concurrent connections (I respond to SYN, but I lose the GET packet somehow. The browser retries after a while, but it takes 3 seconds!) I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to instruct the browser to stop loading things concurrently, because debugging this is taking a long time. The webserver is very stripped down, is not going to be public and is not the main purpose of this application, which is why I'm willing to cut corners in this fashion.

It'd be nice to just limit the concurrent connections to 1, because modifying that parameter using a registry hack for IE and using about:config for Firefox both make things work perfectly.

Any other workaround ideas would be useful, too. A couple I can think of:

1 - Instruct the browser to cache everything with no expiration so the slow loads (.js, .css and image files) happen only once. I can append a checksum to the end of the file (img src="/img/blah.png?12345678") to make sure if I update the file, it's reloaded properly.

2 - Add the .js and .css to load inline with the .html files - but this still doesn't fix the image issue, and is just plain ugly anyway.

Answer 1

I don't believe it's possible to tell a browser like Firefox to not load concurrently, at least not for your users via some http header or something.

Answer 2

So I never found a way to do this.

My underlying issue was too many requests were coming in and overflowing my limited receive buffers in emac ram. Overflowing receive buffers = discarded packets. The resolution was to combine all .js and all .css files into 1 .js and 1 .css file in order to get my requests down. I set all image, js and css pages to have a year's expiration. The html pages are set to expire immediately. I wrote a perl script to append md5 checksums to files so changed files are refetched. Works great now. Pages load instantly after the first load caches everything.