Speed up Firefox...

g5hn710m4xpdwy

well i found out how to make firefox MUCH faster (well not really MUCH faster but, a good bit faster) and i was wondering if i am able to post it since your practidly hacking it( altering it's settings) well can i? and yes it really does work.
Flunk

jonnybadd

Isn't firefox open source? i.e. making things like that fully legal?

L5

ummmm Firefox is open source

g5hn710m4xpdwy

ok then here it is for whoever wants it... it's great

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

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!

hope ya'll like it
Flunk

Mutant_Fruit

Unfortunately this is old news. Also you explained Pipelining incorrectly.

Pipelining is different to concurrent requests. Generally, if a webpage has 10 items, what happens is your browser opens one connection, waits for it to be accepted by the server, downloads the item, closes the connection, then reopens a new connection and repeats. It does this till all 10 items are downloaded.

Simplifiying further, it means that if you're average ping to the server is 100ms, it will take about 1 second to download the page.

Pipeling changes this procedure to just opening one connection, and then downloading the 10 items, and then closing the connection. This speeds things up because you aren't wasting time opening and closing connections.

In practice, it makes very little difference.

g5hn710m4xpdwy

i got it off a friend so sry

T-b0n3

So worth doing or not?On 3meg ntl.

Adam

Talliesin

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

In practice, it makes very little difference.

The W3C research papers on this show that the difference can be quite strong.

That said, with a setting as high as 30 it could reduce the appearance of concurency if you like to do multiple simultaneous downloads (i.e. it'll be faster but feel slower, comparable to multitasking vs. serial tasking computer processes).

Mutant_Fruit

The difference would be very noticeable on high latency connections, but on low latency connections the difference would be a lot less.

I measured the time it took to load boards.ie before and after applying those tweaks using an online testing facility, and it was pretty much the same speed both before and after. I think it was 6% faster, but that isn't really noticeable.

Its worth doing, as it will speed up browsing... just not by very much. Don't expect load times to halve.

g5hn710m4xpdwy

It use to be very slow to load alot of pages here but with this it is almost intint... I would reccomend it.

secret_squirrel

subjectively speaking it 'feels' a lot faster - almost as fast as opera.

g5hn710m4xpdwy

secret_squirrel wrote:

subjectively speaking it 'feels' a lot faster - almost as fast as opera.

Almost? it is faster

Mutant_Fruit

secret_squirrel wrote:

subjectively speaking it 'feels' a lot faster - almost as fast as opera.

Thats what we like to call the placebo effect :P

Zapp Brannigan

i hear that you can get banned form some forums for doing this, as you send out too many requests or something (im computer illeterate so i dont know how to explain it properly)

DemonOfTheFall

http://www.totalidea.com/freestuff4.htm

This program will do all of that for you. Pretty good, makes a big difference for graphic heavy pages.

jozi

Slurms wrote:

i hear that you can get banned form some forums for doing this, as you send out too many requests or something (im computer illeterate so i dont know how to explain it properly)

Can someone back that up because i think i heard that to sometime ago

Talliesin

Slurms wrote:

i hear that you can get banned form some forums for doing this, as you send out too many requests or something (im computer illeterate so i dont know how to explain it properly)

You send out exactly the same number of requests, but with less overhead. You send them out in a manner that is more efficient for you, the server, and any proxies along the way (so they should be grateful if anything), you send them out in a way that reduces the number of concurrent connections you are making and it doesn't work if the server opted not to honour Connection: keep-alive (which servers do not have to honour).

I can't say that no one bans for this, there could be forums run by eejits that think you are doing a bad thing, but you shouldn't be banned for it, if anything the opposite.

Network Performance Effects of HTTP/1.1, CSS1, and PNG (AKA NOTE-pipelining) is worth a read.

Fenster

Was this you?

g5hn710m4xpdwy

lol no it wasnt me...

Mutant_Fruit

Sorry for dragging this back up, but i decided to (once again) do some speed tests both with and without the firefox optimisations.

My conclusion, there is no change in the loading times of www.boards.ie whether the optimisations are on or off. Check it out yourself on different sites by using http://www.numion.com/Stopwatch.

Khannie

Two things could affect your tests:

1) Use of a proxy
2) Cache

It's probably the latter. If all the images are stored on your local disk (likely) then you wont see any speed improvement.

Raiser

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

* Edited by Raiser *Unfortunately this is old news. Also you explained Pipelining incorrectly.

Pipelining is different to concurrent requests. Generally......YAK YAK....

....JABBER JABBER....Simplifiying further, it means that if.....

That advice was submitted in good faith in an effort to help people out Mutant Fruit - your response is so negative and preachy that I bet you're an annoying toss3r.

Its good natured posts like this that help people with missing drivers, inexplicable error messages or whatever they happen to be surfing for....Be glad some people take the time.....

P.S. Why not add an opinion or correction/improvement - without the all-knowing attitude?

besty

i just did this and it has seemed to speed it up a bit. cheers for the help

fletch

Yeh I just did it too and it seems a bit faster

Khannie

Raiser wrote:

That advice was submitted in good faith in an effort to help people out Mutant Fruit - your response is so negative and preachy that I bet you're an annoying toss3r.

Its good natured posts like this that help people with missing drivers, inexplicable error messages or whatever they happen to be surfing for....Be glad some people take the time.....

P.S. Why not add an opinion or correction/improvement - without the all-knowing attitude?

Easy now. Easy.

There's no need for that.

For one thing, mutant regularly contributes a lot more here than you have (yet). Also, there are requests in the stickies that you do a search before posting a new topic. While your suggestion is helpful, it was posted before and that is a valid point. I wont comment beyond that.

Raiser

Fair enough, I just don't like to see well-intentioned people like Flunked getting sniped at by people who know better than them.

How many times have you all found advice, tips, & cures to tech. woes on the net?

- Also how many people took the time to thank Flunked? Plenty of people posted back that this advice it improved things.....

aphex™

The other day i accidentally disabled the cache in firefox with the web developer toolbar. Boy, were things slow to load, each item 1 by 1. It's amazing how much time the cache saves if it works.
With the cache emptied you can really see this trick working. www.cnn.com loads nice and fast. I put the Max part up to 100, though.

Never saw the trick mentioned before, cheers

mburke

Is there anything similar for Internet Explorer ??

Mutant_Fruit

Khannie wrote:

If all the images are stored on your local disk (likely) then you wont see any speed improvement.

As far as i know, IBB have no proxy, and i definately amn't running one on my computer, so i doubt thats the problem. Also i did clear the cache before each run of the speedtest. Maybe www.boards.ie (the homepage) just isn't the right kind of page to really feel the benefits of pipelining, or maybe the server doesn't support pipelining.

Here are results from a (very slightly) larger test. I cleared the cache in between each timing session, and i took the average (more or less) of all the readings (disregarding the rediculously high ones). Notice the way the loading time for microsoft.com increased by over 50% with the tweaks enabled. Everything else showed a net benefit of less than 0.1s. I don't think thats a noticeable speed increase. Of course, different computers, different results. I'm just saying for me, there is no benefit.

site		         without tweak	      with tweak
www.microsoft.com	1.2s		1.9s
amazon.co.uk		1.79s		1.72s
google.ie		0.60s		0.58s
ucd.ie			0.80s		0.77s

Raiser wrote:

That advice was submitted in good faith in an effort to help people out Mutant Fruit - your response is so negative and preachy that I bet you're an annoying toss3r...........
P.S. Why not add an opinion or correction/improvement - without the all-knowing attitude?

Eh, i was was just trying to get a point across. I'm not sure how computer literate people are here, so simplifying works best for me. I could have used big technical words if i wanted. And its an all-knowing attitude because i do know all*. And the reason i know it, is because i made the same mistake he did explaining pipelining before, and someone corrected ME pretty much as i corrected him.

Back to the point, on fast (broadband) connections, these tweaks show little benefit. Possibly if someone were to try them on a dialup connection it would result in a second or two decrease in page loading times, but with pretty much everyone with broadband in ireland having 1meg+ connections i don't think it makes a huge difference to them.

* All referring to pipelining in this case