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Asked: 2026-05-17T01:33:11+00:00

I have been working on a jquery plugin that uses a HTML5 audio player

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I have been working on a jquery plugin that uses a HTML5 audio player () to play back mp3’s. I noticed that in various browsers multiple GET requests were made for the same MP3 file when the audio player was loaded.

I created a simple standalone HTML file to test this out.

<html>
<head></head>

<body>
    <audio controls src="http://localhost:5000/files/one.mp3" type="audio/mp3"></audio>
<body>  
<html>

When opening the page in OS X Safari 5.0.1, I saw the following logs from my web server (3 GET requests):

>> Thin web server (v1.2.7 codename No Hup)
>> Maximum connections set to 1024
>> Listening on 0.0.0.0:5000, CTRL+C to stop
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2010 11:09:32] "GET /one.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 4030432
0.0022
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2010 11:09:32] "GET /one.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 4030432
0.0012
127.0.0.1 - - [17/Aug/2010 11:09:32] "GET /one.mp3 HTTP/1.1" 200 4030432
0.0010

Note, the requests are for “GET /one.mp3” and not “GET /files/one.mp3” because my Thin web server is running off a prefix of /files.

When opening the same HTML file in OS X Chrome, I saw 2 GET requests for /one.mp3.

When opening the same HTML file in OS X Opera, I saw 1 GET request for /one.mp3.

What is the reason for the multiple GET requests for a single files? The bandwidth on my server is limited and I throttle connections at 75KB/s (thats HTTP connection, not user). My worry is if Safari is making 3 HTTP connections to download (stream) a single mp3 file, it will reduce the number of concurrent users my server can handle.

Is this something I should be worried about in terms of performance/bandwidth? Also, I am curious as to why certain browsers make multiple requests for the same file, while other do not.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Is it possible that Safari is making additional requests to fetch metadata? Try different values of the preload attribute to see if it makes any difference:

    • preload=”none” – no data is prefetched (shouldn’t see any GETs)
    • preload=”metadata” – basic metadata like duration, bit rate, sample rate, etc. is prefetched (should see one GET)
    • preload=”auto” – the whole file is prefetched (may see multiple GETs)

    See http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#attr-media-preload for a full description of this attribute.

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