Firefox/Waterfox and Broadband users, READ THIS!!

[Topcat]

This is simple, and works wonders for page loading speed!

Want Firefox to run 2/3 times faster? Course you do. Read on...

Here's something for broadband (will have the opposite effect for 56kers) 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: (by double clicking them)

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 recieves.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages 2-3 times faster now. I swear it works, pages are loaded in a split second for me now. Very Happy



Thats it. Enjoy fast loading pages!!! Works like a charm!

[willawake]

heh. good find. smooth loading of images now

[stretch0069]

hmmmm....the jury here is still out.......not sure if there is any difference or not.

Maybe......someday...sometime.....i will have a real connection to the information superhighway. For now i'm stuck on an old dirt trail in the middle of OK.

[xtort107]

Awesome firefox fix, I though I was doing some fast surfing, this is a 1000% increase in load time, my fasterfox page load timer extention says so.

[Fatal0E]

I downloaded FasterFox plugin, it does this, also does prefetching and better pop up blocking. I have found with the prefetching, it seems fastest on optimized and not turbocharged. Have not gotten any popups since installing it.

[snafupen]

some websites cant handle you loading them so fast. i had to turn this stuff off because i wasnt able to access some websites.

[willawake]

actually i was wondering why firefox wasnt doing such a great job of caching images. well if i check tools/options/cache it is default 50mb which is pretty small i guess for the amount of surfing i do. at the moment i set it to 1gb and all is ok. i guess i should clear the cache periodically also.

[Per Hansson]

Originally Posted by willawake

actually i was wondering why firefox wasnt doing such a great job of caching images. well if i check tools/options/cache it is default 50mb which is pretty small i guess for the amount of surfing i do. at the moment i set it to 1gb and all is ok. i guess i should clear the cache periodically also.

Don't do that

It will clob up your filesystem, so many files below 4kb (standard NTFS cluster size) will also make you loose allot of space.

Plus defragging or scanning for viruses etc will take ages because you will literally end up with millions of files...

Also if you do have broadband it will actually be faster to have a smaller cache, because the harddrive will have a hard time poking through all those millions cache files looking for the right one... (vs just fetching it from the net that is)

[willawake]

ah back to the drawing board then. i really have to find time to go through the firefox optimisation articles.

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally Posted by willawake

ah back to the drawing board then. i really have to find time to go through the firefox optimisation articles.

Do you have another hd available? One good way to increase performance is to use a seperate partition for stuff like that (Photoshop scratch disk, Windows pagefile, temp folders, and cache directories). Not to mention, you could increase the size of your cache in Firefox, and it wouldn't incurr the performance hit on your OS drive.

[sillydanny]

ho ho~~~
useful method....loading smooth.....
thx Topcat supply^^

[yanz]

@Fullmetal Chocobo, exactly what i did. I still have this old page in the cache:

[Topcat]

^^
Ohh wow!! Thats like 2 years old! LOL Good layout, except it was PHPBB....

[willawake]

shit i dont even remember it looking like that...my name is there though....old skool badcappers RULE!!!

[AKBessy]

"AWD is just training wheels for RWD." Oh WOW. What the heck? We're talking about All-wheel-drive and Rear-wheel-drive here? Wait, I need to go see where Topcat is located again!

[AKBessy]

Topcat, "MO" meaning Montana?

[Fizzycapola]

Yeap, theres alot of *fun* to be had with those settings in about:config

Filter:
network.http
cache
memory

a good start for experimenting, speed isn't the only consideration, also fluidity of browsing, resources and cpu utilisation.

Changes will make the browser out of spec though for some websites, i.e setting to make 30 requests / connections at once is a bit aggressive for some servers won't allow it. I think I determined my optimal was around 11 connections per server. When limits are inplace they're usually allow maximum of 4-8 connections.

nglayout.initialpaint.delay
I was looking for that actually, remeber old beta firefox with that in the prefs, wow images rolled down the screen like 56kmodem, this is probably the best tweak without having side-effects/compatibility issues.

Also don't know if it still works, the string:
browser.cache.memory.capacity - set how much RAM you want to use.

Also setting http to normal 1.0 may give improvements for some, I notice using the compressed header 1.1/2 sometimes gave me slow browsing and problems with some sites.

If you browse the same sites alot without interest for new content, disabling check cache/refresh cache maybe a good idea.

[AKBessy]

I changed my settings to the recommended ones and I notice a big improvement on speed for my regular sites - haven't tried any other sites (new ones). Pretty cool because I am on a 64k DSL connection. I, also, don't know how I'll be affected when another user here at home jumps on the line too ..... same as usual chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chugga whooo-whooo!

I was wondering how some of the other sites are going to handle my computer hitting them with 30 requests at once and will keep the paper in case I need to look at the instructions to change the settings.

[stretch0069]

Originally Posted by AKBessy

"AWD is just training wheels for RWD." Oh WOW. What the heck? We're talking about All-wheel-drive and Rear-wheel-drive here? Wait, I need to go see where Topcat is located again!

thats from a post where TC was giving me crap about wanting an All Wheel Drive car.

And yes......just about any topic is up for discussion around here.

MO is Missouri. Montana is MT.

[WNG]

Anyone else notice how each new release of Firefox seems to be getting bloated and slower?
It takes ~60MB of RAM to view a webpage, and 60MB for each open tab!
I have only a few extensions/add-ons installed.
This isn't so much an issue on my desktop with 1G. But,
On older systems with limited RAM capacity of 256MB, it's crippling now.
(older laptops, P3, and motherboards from Intel with 512 max RAM capacity.)
WTF?
At the moment, I have 5 tabs open, does it really need 250 MB of RAM? Come on Mozilla!