I would be so happy if it was possible to use Firefox or any other browser then IE6.
But also these browsers have the same limitations only with different thresholds and easier to configure.

I believe IE8 has a threshold of 6 and Firefox a threshold of 8 in the latest versions.

Of course the best thing would be to optimize the performance of the database and that’s the first thing we are going to do. But this will still leave the part that we are doing parallel requests and if the optimization is not that great the synchronous way it works now will slow down the user experience.

So together with this performance boost of the database i also did some searching for the options we have for making more requests at a time.

Also the Comet/Websocket stuff is very interesting point of view. This kind of architecture is already considered for the next release where we want the user interface to respond to commands from an other application. But we will certainly have a look at this earlier to help us with the overall user experience.

Cheers Kris

Couldn’t server-pus/COMET stuff reduce the amount of requests or am I missing the point here…

I realize I know too little about the application but here’s my 2 cents worth:
It seems you have a good view on what future request are going to be. This givens all kinds of caching possibilities.
* Is it an option to serve the request without going to the database directly? Have some async process doing that for you for instance?
* Maybe it’s possible to have a special table in the database (memory table?) which is just for serving those requests. The data is, in another process, then distributed to the rest of the tables.