general socket question

Question

Hi guys

I'm building a client that "talks" to the http server. Now my client needs to download files simultaneously. Right now my client just opens a socket (actually Async Socket) for every connection, but I was wondering whether I could do that with just one socket?

Thanks

Alex

Answer 1

You can have multiple requests on the same socket but they must be sequentially handled. In HTTP this is called a persistent connection and you can accomplish it using the keep-alive header.

If you want to download 2 files individually at the same time you'd need 2 separate connections.

Answer 2

Take a look at RFC 2616 section 8 "Connections".