Make youre Firefox MUCH MUCH faster

[Subby]

Wow.

That made a huge difference.

Thanks.

[cbfair]

I'm naturally sceptical, but not super-techy so I wanted to explore and make sure this really does what the poster says instead of opening some backdoor in my firewall, etc. I found several references to it behaving as advertised and no references to security holes, etc. so I guess I'm going to enable the change.

One thing people may want to be aware of are potential display problems decribed here:

[ QUOTE ]
Yes, enabling HTTP pipelining can dramatically improve networking performance. The downside, and the reason it's not enabled by default, is that it can prevent Web pages from displaying correctly. If you've enabled this, and you find pages that aren't displaying correctly, please don't blame Firefox or the Web developer. It's probably the fact that you enabled an "unsupported" feature which is incompatible with some Web servers and proxy servers.


The second change, setting the initial paint delay at zero, may get you some content on the screen faster, but it's worth noting that it will dramatically slow down the time it takes the entire page to display. Here's what's going on. Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine, is trying to optimize between the cost of waiting for a bit more data versus doing more painting and reflows as new data comes in. Waiting a bit longer before it starts painting the page gives Gecko a chance to receive more content before chewing up CPU cycles to render and reflow the document. If you drop this value down to zero or near zero, that means you'll see the page start displaying a bit earlier, but not having received much data in that short interval, you'll have a lot more paint and reflow cycles to complete rendering of the page.


This one probably comes down to a combination of bandwidth, CPU speed, and personal preference. If it works for you, and you don't mind the side-effects, then great. Just note that what works for one person/system, may not work for another.


Yes, there are tuning change you can make (even at compile time, see Moox' optimized builds) that will dramatically alter the performance characteristics of Firefox. Feel free to experiment, but remember that most of the defaults are defaults for a reason. If your browser starts misbehaving or web sites look broken, it might be worth going back to default settings.

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Also be aware that the change is reported to cause display problems with flash content in some cases.

If any problems crop up, just disable pipelining.

[IsaacW]

[ QUOTE ]
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30.

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You probably don't need to set this value to more than 8 or so, unless you're loading a page with a lot of pictures on it. Since the text of the page will all come down one connection anyway, only a page with more pictures/other elements than you have maxrequests set to will load any faster. The other problem with this setting is that if everyone did this and visited a page with a lot of images on it, there would potentially be a slowdown on the server side since everyone is requesting up to 30 images at the same time.

More Firefox Tweaks Here

[Rudbaeck]

Woo, good advice. But please don't set it to 30 and surf 2+2 during primetime. I want to actually access the site without tweak happy kids DOSing it. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[BugsBunny]

It appears that any setting > 8 is actually equal to 8.

[RollaJ]

[ QUOTE ]
Hi all;

For all of those who use Firefox, heres another reason why this browser kicks ass. I found this on a websites and it makes my firefox works much much faster.

[ QUOTE ]
Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!


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this is the web page that I downloaded this tweak from by the way. Enjoy

mushi [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/spade.gif[/img]

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Wow, now I can J/O even faster!!! [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img]

[IsaacW]

[ QUOTE ]
It appears that any setting > 8 is actually equal to 8.

[/ QUOTE ]
As in, Firefox caps it at 8 (but my browser and I are the only two players left [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img])? Or is it just that most pages don't have more than 8 elements to download anyways?

If the former, that's a relief, because this could cause some major problems for adserver.conjelco.com if all of 2+2's Firefox users started loading all the ads 30 at a time [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Muisyle]

These settings violate the HTTP protocol, and give you a speed boost by flooding the web server with 20-something connections for every single image and page request. There's a reason that they're not the default.

These settings will not only cause many web servers to have problems, but they can also make your web browser be mistaken for a flood attack, which will make the server add your IP to an "ignore" list. Stay away from these "optimized" settings, unless you know exactly what they do and how they work.

[RollaJ]

[ QUOTE ]
These settings violate the HTTP protocol, and give you a speed boost by flooding the web server with 20-something connections for every single image and page request

[/ QUOTE ]

Sounds good to me

[rusty JEDI]

[ QUOTE ]
These settings violate the HTTP protocol, and give you a speed boost by flooding the web server with 20-something connections for every single image and page request. There's a reason that they're not the default.

These settings will not only cause many web servers to have problems, but they can also make your web browser be mistaken for a flood attack, which will make the server add your IP to an "ignore" list. Stay away from these "optimized" settings, unless you know exactly what they do and how they work.

[/ QUOTE ]


Has anyone encountered any problems like this?

Thanks

rJ