Over time that limitation was removed, and today clients easily use six to eight connections per host name. But they still have a limit, so sites continue to use this technique to bump up the number of connections. As the number of objects requested over HTTP is ever-increasing – as I showed before – the large number of connections is then used to make sure HTTP performs well and allow your site to load quickly. It is not unusual for sites to use well over 50 or even up to 100 or more connections now for a single site using this technique. Recent stats from httparchive.org show that the top 300K URLs in the world need, on average, 40(!) TCP connections to display the site, and the trend says this is still increasing slowly over time.