In building DubFiler, I had to learn all about downloads and browser behavior. Browsers usually only allow two downloads from a server at once. Which meant if I started downloading a file while another was downloading or “streaming” (being downloaded by the Flash audio player), the page would hang. Not a great user experience.
After some digging around the web, I found the solution. Browsers consider subdomains (anything.dubfiler.com) another domain, so you get two more simultaneous downloads. People use this for faster image downloads, but it works great when yre downloading other files, too.
So I just created subdomains pointing to the same domain – images.dubfiler.com just points to dubfiler.com. There was no noticable server hit, and browsers will download more files simultaneously. Hope this helps.
