I’ve been frustrated lately with my inability to have more than 2 downloads at a time through Internet Explorer.  I had the same feeling of frustration whilst working on a multithreaded C# program last October.  I had to send over 14,000,000 photos from one server to another via FTP due to the firewall rules that were in place.  To solve that one I had to add a little chunk to the app.config of the program. 

  <system.net>

    <connectionManagement>

      <remove address="*"/>

      <add address="*" maxconnection="40" />

    </connectionManagement>

  </system.net>

That’s all it took to have my C# program open more than 2 connections.  Now I have mine set to 40 since it was a server talking to another server with a nice speed between them, but you can adjust it to whatever your operations can handle.

So recently this general frustration has come back to haunt me, however it is in dealing with Internet Explorer 7.  So I did a Google search(as everyone should do when trying to solve a problem).   I received information almost instantaneously on how to change both IE7 and IE8’s default max connections.  Now I have to note that for IE8 the default connection setting is already set to 6 rather than the classic 2.  But if you’re like me you still aren’t satisfied with 6 (just because it’s the default).  So below I’ve listed the registry changes that you need to make for both IE7 and IE8

For IE7 you’ll be adding two new DWORD values to your registry.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

Name: MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server

Decimal of 10

Name: MaxConnectionsPerServer

Decimal of 10

For IE8 there are also two DWORDs to add however they are in different locations.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPERSERVER

Name: iexplore.exe

Decimal of 10

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER1_0SERVER

Name: iexplore.exe

Decimal of 10

As Microsoft’s website states this applies to:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0, when used with:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

Microsoft Windows XP Professional

Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Update Rollup 2

Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (32-bit x86)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition for Itanium-Based Systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter x64 Edition

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit x86)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86)

Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Server 2003

Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP

Windows Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Server 2003 IA64

Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition

Windows Internet Explorer 8