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We have a web application that is being restricted by the max number of persistent connections per server in Safari. FireFox 3 allows us to easily configure this browser restriction, and there is a hack for IE 8. Is there a known way to change this restriction in Safari?

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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 17 '09 at 0:37


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I wish there was. But this is a part of the HTTP 1.1 Specifications (Page 44) so a well behaved browser shouldn't violate it anyway.

If you're having troubles with designing your own application, then the answer is to look into different ways of doing what you're trying to (try Stack Overflow for this), because if you ever then get an outside visitor you can't very well ask them to reconfigure their browser with ugly hacks just to view your website...

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This may not easily solve the original problem, but there is a workaround to the persistent connection/host limit in Safari. You can fool Safari by editing the hosts file. For example, to /etc/hosts you might add: host1 host2 ...

Now you can have "x" persistent connections with each dummy host name, where "x" is the limit in Safari. You are stuck entering and updating the IP address, unless you use another hack to periodically update it. See the answer by Guðmundur H here: auto-update IP address in /etc/hosts

This came in handy when using server-push to display images from 16 different security cameras. Safari 5.0.x stops loading after the sixth image, but using dummy server names all pointing to the same IP address allows an unlimited number of connections.

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No, there is no exposed setting for this in Safari.

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