The Fast and the Furiously Slow

Posted on January 06, 2003 @ 07:14 in Webdesign

Slashdot points to an article that explains why Internet Explorer sometimes displays websites blazingly fast and why it sometimes is so damn slow. Turns out that Microsoft is breaking one of the most elementary rules of the TCP/IP protocol that underlies all traffic exchange on the internet.

If you connect to a Microsoft webserver with IE, connections will be set up really fast (other conditions permitting) but the setting up of that connection will happen in a completely non-standard manner. If you don't run a Microsoft webserver, your webserver may respond to such non-standard requests for webpages in two ways: A) it may send a message informing the browser that the request could not be fulfilled, or B) it may just drop the request and do nothing. In situation A Internet Explorer will immediately set up a connection with the webserver in a standards compliant way and the connection speed doesn't suffer all that much... so it does know how to behave, just not up front!

In situation B however, IE keeps sending non-standard requests without properly setting up a connection with the webserver and thus IE has to wait for every request it sends to time out before it will send out a standards compliant request. So if situation B occurs, your connection will appear gallingly slow, thanks to Microsoft yet again breaking the most elementary rules of playing together.

Lock-in, lock-out...

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. Did you read the followup to this article? Turns out the conclusions were not so cut and dried. Lots of valid nasty things to say about Microsoft technology, but this isn't really one of them.

    Posted by Bill Barnes on January 28, 2003 @ 09:23

  2. Sounds interesting, but I couldn't find where those findings would be published. I've gone over Peeve Farm's pages, but with no luck... maybe I didn't look hard enough.

    You have a URL?

    Posted by Frank on January 29, 2003 @ 08:18

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