I'm not disagreeing with your comments... my own feeling, however, is
that in terms of the overhead imposed on servers, the number of
simultaneous requests is a smaller issue than the effective use (and
re-use) of transport connections.
Commenting in response to the folks who say that a server reaches
steady state whether the clients are single-connection or
parallal-connection: I agree with the note that with faster user
response, the user may read more pages over a given period of time.
This will increase the steady state load by some amount. (My feeling
is that it would be less than 25% for a population of serious
browsers, and a higher percentage for a population of wild surfers)
--karl--