Increasing number of http WebService connections

Question

I have an server application (running as a Windows Service) that receives calls from many clients. In turn this single process will call out to an other host Web Service over http (.net 2.0 Web Services).

From my understanding (it maybe wrong) is that for a single client (our server app in this case) can only make 2 simultaneous http requests to a Web Service by default. Now if this is the case can this be increased, what is the preferred value and whether this has to be done on the application server side or the host Web Service?

We need it to support more simultaneous calls so that we can have more throughput for our clients.

We are running .net 3.5 on the app server and the Web Services are from what I know is 2.0

Thanks

Answer 1

The number of HTTP connections being opened is under your control, assuming the client is your own process and not a browser (browsers limit the number of connections per domain, but even that's somewhat configurable). There's no one correct/preferred number of connections per client. It really depends on the performance characteristics of your application - what sort of resources it tries to load remotely, how frequently, is caching involved, the size of each call, etc. Having said that, I find it unlikely that simply increasing the number of connections per client will have a positive effect on your throughput.

Answer 2

Here is the thing.

maxconnections config file sample