Silverlight MultiScaleImage connection limit?

Question

Silverlight's MultiScaleImage appears to only allow two simultaneous connections to request tiles, irrespective of subdomain or browser connection limits. This makes panning or zooming the a DeepZoom image really slow.

How can this connection limit be overriden?

Silverlight doesn't appear to support the usual app.config/maxConnections setting used by .Net apps.

EDIT: I've been able to verify the number of simultaneous connections using Fiddler. The old version of our application (written in ASP.net) uses all available connections in IE, but the same tiles rendered in the MultiScaleImage control in Silverlight are only requested two at a time.

Answer 1

I thought this was a browser limitation, not a Silverlight limitation.

Answer 2

Silverlight will use the underlying HTTP stack provided by the browser so that it can benefit from a common cookie and cache management. It would seem logical then that the underlying stack's connection limit would apply to Silverlight.

A simple way to check would be to host the SL app in Firefox which has a more generous default limit (and is more easily tweaked via about:config). Does it make use of more connections? If so then the reason why you seeing only two is because WinINET (the HTTP stack used by IE) is limited to 2 connections by default.