18 Oct, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
I was IMing a friend of mine, and we were talking about the speed of Google's Chrome, but how I still liked FireFox.

He directed me to this:
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is cut and pasted from another forum, these settings help pages load on Firefox faster:

1. Type about:config into the address bar and hit return.

2. Alter the entries as follows (by double clicking each entry):

Set network.http.max-connections to 48

Set network.http.max-connections-per-server to 24

Set network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy to 12

Set network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 6

Set network.http.pipelining to true

Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to true

Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8. Any more and you may get banned from the site visited, as it may be viewed as DOS attack. Try a higher value say upto 32 but be prepared to lower the value if sites fail to load.

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.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Two days of using it, no issues so far (using version 3.0.3). Just thought I would share.
18 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Interesting, I wonder what the default values are. I'm too lazy to download the source right now. :)

Sounds good, although I wouldn't set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0, I'd choose some other small number (depending on if the value is seconds, milliseconds, etc). Quite often, web designers are lazy gits who don't bother to put size information in their image tags, but sometimes they do. If the browser knows the size of the image ahead of time, it can leave a hole for it, otherwise it has to rearrange things when it finally does load.
18 Oct, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Careful, you'll get banned from websites like I did for doing this. :P

Or at least that's what MudMagic did (claiming I was doing a DDOS).
18 Oct, 2008, elanthis wrote in the 4th comment:
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Be really careful with settings like those. There are tons of sites that advertise changes like that without actually measuring the real performance changes they cause, and in a lot of cases they can make things slower instead of faster.
18 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Zeno said:
Careful, you'll get banned from websites like I did for doing this. :P

Or at least that's what MudMagic did (claiming I was doing a DDOS).

Kyndig did the same to me over the same issue at one point, but I guess he'd already had it out with you over it because he never came out and claimed I was DDOSing him, just explained (when questioned by email) that his firewall was only set to allow x simultaneous connections from a given IP…
18 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 6th comment:
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I think that these "speedup" techniques are a little impolite. It's imposing significant extra load on the server and network just to save a second or so. That means that other people trying to access the site would be slowed down. There's a reason why the default is to be much more conservative with the number of connection requests. Were I writing a server, I'd be quite upset with people doing things like this and would probably put in some kind of denial mechanism beyond a handful of connections.
18 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
While what you're saying isn't unreasonable on the surface, David; in the case of Kyndig accusing Zeno of a DDOS and of setting his firewall to ban us, Kyndig's responses were based on the default settings for Opera and Firefox, not on our having gone in and reset our browser to the settings specified above. In which case, it's a bit unreasonable to assume that someone is DDOSing you because they installed a new clean copy of one of the most popular browsers and has dared to use it to visit your site. Now, if either of us had changed the default settings as suggested above then I could maybe see it, but even then, realistically I would have to ask which web server software (in conjunction with what bandwidth options one has chosen to host a web server behind) would it really be unreasonable to request such a "significant extra load" from? Worst case scenario would be that you've decided to host your web site on a lower bandwidth connection (or older machine) that can't handle more than so many hits at a time and you should be compensating by setting up bandwidth throttling on your server.

Can you imagine if a site like Microsoft's updater automatically set their firewall to totally block any site that hit their servers with more than, oh I don't know, 6 simultaneous connections? (Remember, we're not talking about throttling here, we're talking about a full site ban until manually lifted after an emailed discussion with the site owner…) What would be the public reaction to that? Would you still feel that those so hitting the site were being a little impolite? (Yes, this is purposely an extreme example.)

I can't say that 24-48 simultaneous connections isn't a little overboard on a per browser basis, but even then, should I honestly be blocking anyone who visits my sites from multiple browsers or multiple machines within their networks too, because of their rudeness? And, from the server side, I have no way of knowing with any real degree of certainty whether you've hit my site even 48 times from the same browser at the same time of if you're having a lan party and everyone present decided to hit my site from their respective machines within moments of each other to discuss info listed there while looking at it together if they're all behind a firewall that's only showing me their collective IP rather than individual machine IPs. Do you have better detection in your web server?
18 Oct, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 8th comment:
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Uh he didn't set his firewall to ban me. I don't know about you, but in my case it simply triggered the firewall automatically.
19 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 9th comment:
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I think the only number in the above that bothers me (load-wise) is setting the pipeline to 8. I'd probably set it to 3 or 4, myself. If your page is graphic heavy, loading multiple graphics in parallel will speed things up, and doing it a couple at a time isn't going to matter much to the server unless it's already overloaded, or running on a C64.

I know the default configuration for Apache is 10 pre-fork processes, and if you're running a real web site, you probably upped that by a bit.

Grabbing in parallel will spike the load higher, but for a shorter time too. As long as you don't go overboard and ask for dozens at once.
19 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Conner, I didn't say these settings were the same thing as launching a DDOS attack. I just said it was impolite. Launching a DDOS goes far beyond being merely impolite. :wink:

quixadhal said:
If your page is graphic heavy, loading multiple graphics in parallel will speed things up, and doing it a couple at a time isn't going to matter much to the server unless it's already overloaded, or running on a C64.

Or you don't have extremely high bandwidth and are trying to serve several people at once. Instead of the bandwidth going toward several people, it will go towards several people and then to each person several times. Obviously you can't cut a pie such that its slices become greater than the whole. :wink:
19 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
I never so much as implied that you had said that, David, I just don't think it's nearly as impolite as you seem to be saying that it is considering that, while the suggested numbers from the original post may be a bit high, I was talking about browser defaults that are preset by the developers.

Zeno, it's not that he manually went into his firewall and set it to ban either of us, as far as I know, but that he'd set his firewall to fully ban anyone who hit it in the way that firefox and opera were both set to as default at the time. From my own firewall expriences, that's not a typical default firewall setting.
19 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Conner said:
while the suggested numbers from the original post may be a bit high, I was talking about browser defaults that are preset by the developers.

I thought that since you were replying to my comment about the suggested numbers in the original post, you were talking about those too, and not the browser defaults, which I never referred to… ah well. It seems that we agree that the numbers suggested in the original are post are high, which is all I wanted to get at. :smile:
19 Oct, 2008, Guest wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Conner said:
Zeno, it's not that he manually went into his firewall and set it to ban either of us, as far as I know, but that he'd set his firewall to fully ban anyone who hit it in the way that firefox and opera were both set to as default at the time. From my own firewall expriences, that's not a typical default firewall setting.


I dunno. In all the years I'd visited the site on and off using Firefox I never once tripped his firewall, even when I had been fiddling with trying out some of the speed settings suggested here. You'd think if he wanted to block anyone, he'd have blocked me :P

I've tried speed settings like this before. Honestly I can never tell the difference. That implies to me that there simply isn't much advantage to it that can be noticed on a reasonably quick connection.
19 Oct, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Zeno, it's not that he manually went into his firewall and set it to ban either of us, as far as I know, but that he'd set his firewall to fully ban anyone who hit it in the way that firefox and opera were both set to as default at the time. From my own firewall expriences, that's not a typical default firewall setting.

What? I don't know where you got that from, but that can't be true.
19 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
If he was banning people who are using default browser settings, one would think that an awful lot of people would have noticed.
20 Oct, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Samson said:
I've tried speed settings like this before. Honestly I can never tell the difference. That implies to me that there simply isn't much advantage to it that can be noticed on a reasonably quick connection.

The increases for me have been noticeable. Still no websites giving me any problems. Will post if I run into any issues, anywhere.
20 Oct, 2008, kiasyn wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
/me quickly firewalls Mabus out.
20 Oct, 2008, Mabus wrote in the 18th comment:
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kiasyn said:
/me quickly firewalls Mabus out.

You make baby raptors cry!
;)
23 Oct, 2008, Tricky wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
:notes that I haven't been banned from anywhere with those speed settings yet (including here).

:grinning:

Tricky
0.0/19