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DPChallenge Forums >> General Discussion >> Re-Tweak Firefox if lastest update seems slow
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 09/07/2005 03:57:57 PM · #1
Generally Firefox screams on broadband, but after the lastest update
(Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6) it seemed really slow, sometimes hanging a while.

Bingo - just checked and saw the tweaks that were previously done were written over with the update.

All it took was to do this again:

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” (double-click to toggle)

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” (double-click to toggle)

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” (no quote marks) and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

09/07/2005 04:16:37 PM · #2
Originally posted by BradP:
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

FYI... not only can enabling pipelining cause pages to render incorrectly (the reason it's not enabled by default), but setting it to an excessively high value can be considered "flooding" on some sites because it opens multiple connections to the web server just for the benefit of a single user. Most webhosts would consider it malicious to attempt to open 30+ HTTP connections at once. Luckily, Firefox enforces a hard-coded limit of 8 to this value regardless of what number you specify via about:config. (See this blog entry for more info on how pipelining breaks web sites.)

As for the paint delay thing... it may get you some content on the screen faster, but it's worth noting that it will dramatically slow down the time it takes the entire page to display. Here's what's going on. Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine, is trying to optimize between the cost of waiting for a bit more data versus doing more painting and reflows as new data comes in. Waiting a bit longer before it starts painting the page gives Gecko a chance to receive more content before chewing up CPU cycles to render and reflow the document. If you drop this value down to zero or near zero, that means you'll see the page start displaying a bit earlier, but not having received much data in that short interval, you'll have a lot more paint and reflow cycles to complete rendering of the page.

Message edited by author 2005-09-07 16:17:21.
 09/07/2005 04:19:23 PM · #3
Thanks! It's MUCH faster!! wooo hooo.....
 09/07/2005 04:35:34 PM · #4
Interesting read Eddy.

As much most of that blog is total greek to me, I can see it could be an issue and could tax servers. Those changes really made a huge difference, regardless of the hard coding in the engine.

I only visit about 1/2 dozen sites in the course of the day, and since making those changes, see no issues with what is being dislayed, nor errors or any kind. Page request to display times have improved dramitically. For instance, I have my preferences to display 100 thumbs per page here on this site. When going to Photos, Browse, it would take a good 20-30 seconds or so to complete writing the page.
After the tweak, closed Firefox to dump the cache, went to the same Photos, Browse and within about 5 seconds, the 1st 100 thumbs are shown and the page write is done.

This is on a typical 384 DSL, AMD 2200+ PC with 500MB RAM, NVIDEA GeForce 4 MX4400 128MB Video card. Not a high-end machine, but no slouch either. Performance increase is VERY noticeable.
 09/07/2005 04:44:42 PM · #5
I don't speak french.
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