How To Speed Up Firefox (Helpful Vanity)

Posted on 12/12/2004 12:45:50 PM PST by KoRn

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 recieves.

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

aww, u suck i was going to post the exact same thing. 
Tell me, did u get it from hackaday?

There is a problem though, everytime u use firefox, the settings dont save. So basically everytime you would turn on ur computer, you would have to change the settings again.
Im still trying to find a way to save the changes.

get the extention configuration mania

and then go and add those.

configuration mania lets you set pipelining, so that should keep it in place.

Connection Tweaks
The "other" type of optimization commonly seen instructs you to alter the "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", "network.http.max-connections-per-server" and other related settings. These are EXTREMELY DAMAGING "optimizations" to apply and should be avoided at all costs. These settings violate the HTTP protocol, which recommends a limit of 2 connections per server. When you increase it beyond that, a lot of bad things begin to happen:

The web server is often the hardest hit. The Apache web server maintains a number of "slots" which are processes lying around to handle requests as they come in. Since they usually come in at a steady rate, the server can create and destroy extra processes as needed to handle the load. When you and your "optimized" settings hit the server however, almost all of the slots that are idle are suddenly taken up by your browser. This forces the server to suddenly create a bunch of new processes to handle other traffic which is a CPU-intensive task. When you are done hogging up the slots, the server suddenly finds itself with way more processes than are needed for normal traffic, so it will kill off the extra ones.

What's worse is that since most tweaks involve such a high number of connections, once one element has been transferred, the connection is never used again. This forces the web server to hold all the connections in "keepalive" state as under normal circumstances, more than one request is sent per connection. TCP never gets a chance to automatically find the best RWIN for greatest speeds, load on routers between you and the server is increased thanks to all the extra packets... the whole basis of the HTTP/1.1 specification was to get away from the "one connection per element" days of HTTP/1.0, by applying these tweaks you are simply going back to the 1.0 days.

It's also worth pointing out that there exists an Apache module and netfilter settings that could cause your additional connections to be blocked from the server, resulting in very slow page load times, broken images and possibly even a complete IP ban for this "flooding" behaviour. Please, stick with pipelining and do not touch these settings. There is a very good reason why they are not the default.

muhahhahahhahh It's awesome...doesn't go superspeed but it goes pretty fast..

edit// How come now, some webpages come up as "not found"