title: How can I set maximum connections on BCL's HttpClient?
body: <p>I am using the BCL version of HttpClient (available <a href="http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Net.Http/" rel="nofollow">here</a>) for use in a portable class library.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to set the limit of maximum connections used by an instance of HttpClient?</p>
  
  <p>One of the reasons I'm using HttpClient instead of HttpWebRequest is because in my situation, HttpWebRequest's connection limit of 2 is too low, and causing issues in the case of a purposely long running request. By using an instance of HttpClient per request I've got around this limitation, but now seems to be causing the opposite problem, in that the server is overwhelmed when there are a lot of requests all at once and resulting in exceptions being thrown by the HttpClient.
  So the ideal solution would be being able to set the number of connections used by HttpClient so that it's higher than 2, but less than infinite, and probably closer to 5.</p>