Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - How to speed up FireFox

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How to speed up FireFox - like it could get any faster

Posted 2005-01-31 07:35 PM in Musings.

Great tips on how to Speed Up FireFox, via Larkware. Personally, I used these in my user.js edited with ChromEdit. It feels about 30-40% faster now.

user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
user_pref("content.notify.backoffcount", 5);
user_pref("plugin.expose_full_path", true);
user_pref("ui.submenuDelay", 0);

user_pref("content.interrupt.parsing", true);
user_pref("content.max.tokenizing.time", 2250000);
user_pref("content.notify.interval", 750000);
user_pref("content.notify.ontimer", true);
user_pref("content.switch.threshold", 750000);
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections", 48);
user_pref("network.http.max-connections-per-server", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy", 16);
user_pref("network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", 8);
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);

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Tracked by:
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Tuesday, February 01, 2005 5:52:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

There is a snag with network.http.pipelining though ... it causes nasty problems with some servers/load balancers.

This is probably/hopefully rare, but we are experiencing it with a relatively high-class SSL setup at my company (load balancer with hardware SSL in front of IIS 6.0); everything is peachy except for a few irate Firefox users for whom our SSL site is completely unusable; requests hang and responses get confused. That's the people who have turned on pipelining; turns out the problems go away completely when pipelining is turned back off.

We still don't know whether it is a Firefox flaw or a flaw in the load balancer/server ... it may well be the latter, since the pipelining implementation in such devices probably doesn't get tested very thoroughly because IE doesn't do it.

In any case there sure is a problem, and that's good to be aware of if you turn pipelining on -- then you'll know at least one thing to try if things go sour.