Make firefox work faster

[alexander]

So i meet my good Polish friend Karol this morning, and he tells me about this awesome procedure that will allow you to make your firefox display websites faster than it does by default. What the procedure does is it turns on pipelining in firefox, and tells it to start rendering the page immediately as it gets the packets.

 

ok, so here's the procedure:

in the url bar type in about:config

go down to network.http:

set pipelining to true

set pipelining.maxrequests to 6

set proxy.pipelining to true

ok now right click and add a new integer

name: nglayout.initialpaint.delay

value: 0

then all you need to do is restart firefox, and you should be all set to go (i dont guarantee anything, if something bad happens, its not my fault... yada yada yada, you know the drill for no guarantees)(for those of you who benefits from this, enjoy :eek:)

[C1ay]

So i meet my good Polish friend Karol this morning, and he tells me about this awesome procedure that will allow you to make your firefox display websites faster than it does by default. What the procedure does is it turns on pipelining in firefox, and tells it to start rendering the page immediately as it gets the packets.

 

ok, so here's the procedure:

in the url bar type in about:config

go down to network.http:

set pipelining to true

set pipelining.maxrequests to 6

set proxy.pipelining to true

ok now right click and add a new integer

name: nglayout.initialpaint.delay

value: 0

then all you need to do is restart firefox, and you should be all set to go (i dont guarantee anything, if something bad happens, its not my fault... yada yada yada, you know the drill for no guarantees)(for those of you who benefits from this, enjoy :eek:)

 

That is documented at mozilla here. Mozilla states:

Speed up page rendering

 

By default, Firefox doesn't try to render a web page for 250 milliseconds while it's waiting for data. If you add the code below to your user.js file, Firefox immediately starts to display the page, even without complete data. The drawback, especially on slower machines, is that the total time to display the page will be longer.

 

// Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)

user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

 

Enable Pipelining

 

Pipelining is an experimental feature, designed to improve page-load performance, that is unfortunately not well supported by some web servers and proxies. To try it out, add the following code to your user.js file:

 

// Enable pipelining:

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);

user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);

user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);

 

I tried it quite a while ago and I ended up turning the pipelining back off because of several websites that started to give me trouble after I enabled it.

[Tormod]

I also tried these a few days ago and experienced no difference in page rendering.

[alexander]

I dont know about you guys, but i'm seeing serious improvements on this machine, for example bringing up hypo used to take 4-5 seconds, depending on the time of the day, now its down to like 2-3, hey i'll play with it, if i end up having problems, i'll turn it off, but for now i havent seen anything but good out of it all...

[Tormod]

Yeah, maybe a system restart is what it takes.

[C1ay]

I dont know about you guys, but i'm seeing serious improvements on this machine, for example bringing up hypo used to take 4-5 seconds, depending on the time of the day, now its down to like 2-3, hey i'll play with it, if i end up having problems, i'll turn it off, but for now i havent seen anything but good out of it all...

I didn't say that it didn't work. On some websites the change was dramatic. I just found that after I used it for a few days I kept encountering a number of sites that wouldn't load correctly. I turned it back off off and the problem with those sites went away.

 

BTW Tormod, you only have to close your browser and reopen it, reboot not required.

[alexander]

I just found that after I used it for a few days I kept encountering a number of sites that wouldn't load correctly.

I realize the concequence, but noone is yet to provide a link to a site that did not load correctly for them, nor have i encountered one, yet anyways, also there could have been a bug within the engine, have you tried it with firefox 1.0.3 yet? are you getting the same results?

[Tormod]

I am now noticing that pages DO load faster. Maybe a reboot was what it took.

[Tormod]

BTW Tormod, you only have to close your browser and reopen it, reboot not required.

 

I swear that it didn't work on my Mac before I rebooted...but then again my Mac is so slow these days it's a crime.

[C1ay]

I realize the concequence, but noone is yet to provide a link to a site that did not load correctly for them, nor have i encountered one, yet anyways, also there could have been a bug within the engine, have you tried it with firefox 1.0.3 yet? are you getting the same results?

That was an older version I tried it on so I'll try it on 1.0.3 for a few days and see what happens. I did notice a small difference in setting the paintdelay to 0.

 

I've enabled pipelining but haven't noticed any improvement above that from setting the paintdelay to 0. I also seem to remember some people advocating that maxrequests be set as high as 64 where Mozilla recommends 8. That may have had something to do with it. I'll play with it for a few days and see if I can notice and differences.

 

FWIW, the one thing that has made a significant difference to my surfing speeds was installing my own DNS server. It cut out a big piece of those "Looking up ....." delays.

[alexander]

if we werent moving in a little while, i would have setup a network at home, but since there is no point to it, i dont have one... At school though, absolutely, and if the above us infrastructure wasnt as bad as it is, we would actually have decent speeds... unlike now... :xx:

[C1ay]

if we werent moving in a little while, i would have setup a network at home, but since there is no point to it, i dont have one... At school though, absolutely, and if the above us infrastructure wasnt as bad as it is, we would actually have decent speeds... unlike now... :xx:

I do have a network at home but I run a local DNS server on my laptop even when I'm not on my home network since the dns performance of my service provider sucks.

[alexander]

i run as little on my laptop as i feel comfortable with, basically pretty minimal kernel config (modules, modules, modules), no unnecessary startup anything, service startup/shutdown shortcuts.

[Boaz Bagbag]

I've tried to enable my firebox browser to work faster and it didn't really make any difference. Looks like this setting does not take any affect on slower machines, I need a new computer!

[alexander]

on some machines it does, on some it does not, its sort of strange, you will only see improvements on pages that need to be rendered a lot, so looking at stuff like images, you would have no signifficant improvement, but things like these forums do tend to get rendered faster, thats what i observed anyways...