Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How to speed up Firefox....

Cybergypsy

Cybergypsy

macrumors 68040
Original poster
May 16, 2006
3,094
0
Central Florida!
Just found this and it is a night and day difference:

Useful guide on speeding up firefox for broadband users

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.

(the trick here is clicking the false word and it will change to true)


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!
 
It might make a difference if you're measuring from a really sucky baseline, but I've tried this several times in several places, and although it did appear to be a little faster, the page finished loading at pretty much the same time no matter what the settings were.

It can't really speed things up much, which you'll realise if you think about it. The default number of pipeline requests in firefox is four, ie. four requests are made simultaneously, and the maximum is eight, no matter what value you place in the setting. The server still has to deal with those eight requests, which it'll do on a first come, first served basis. If the server is a heavily used one, your requests will be queued and will be dealt with in turn.

There's a good reason why it's limited to eight requests. A common number of simultaneous connections is in the region of 100. If you set the pipeline requests to 20, only five people could be served at one time.
 
this is some good info. I don't know if it actually speeded anything up on my machine but I don't think it did any harm.

thanks! :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back