Attention Firefox Users

DarkPrime · Post by **DarkPrime** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 9:06 pm

Go here, do mod, enjoy speed. Best used for broadband, though it also seems to work for dialup.

http://www.tfans.com/index.php?showtopic=18635 (please ignore the sigs.)

I'm getting some crazy speeds now.

Psxphile · Post by **Psxphile** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 9:51 pm

Hm, <i>seems</i> to have improved. I won't know for sure until a certain background process completes itself and frees up some resources.

Dark Crow · Post by **Dark Crow** » Sun Feb 13, 2005 11:59 pm

Its official, Firefox is the greatest internet browser ever.

Post by **Pepperidge** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 12:38 am

Yikes, that actually worked!

Dache · Post by **Dache** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:36 am

Be careful with these. The changes here are safe, but:

Connection Tweaks
The "other" type of optimization commonly seen instructs you to alter the "network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server", "network.http.max-connections-per-server" and other related settings. These are EXTREMELY DAMAGING "optimizations" to apply and should be avoided at all costs. These settings violate the HTTP protocol, which recommends a limit of 2 connections per server. When you increase it beyond that, a lot of bad things begin to happen:

The web server is often the hardest hit. The Apache web server maintains a number of "slots" which are processes lying around to handle requests as they come in. Since they usually come in at a steady rate, the server can create and destroy extra processes as needed to handle the load. When you and your "optimized" settings hit the server however, almost all of the slots that are idle are suddenly taken up by your browser. This forces the server to suddenly create a bunch of new processes to handle other traffic which is a CPU-intensive task. When you are done hogging up the slots, the server suddenly finds itself with way more processes than are needed for normal traffic, so it will kill off the extra ones.

What's worse is that since most tweaks involve such a high number of connections, once one element has been transferred, the connection is never used again. This forces the web server to hold all the connections in "keepalive" state as under normal circumstances, more than one request is sent per connection. TCP never gets a chance to automatically find the best RWIN for greatest speeds, load on routers between you and the server is increased thanks to all the extra packets... the whole basis of the HTTP/1.1 specification was to get away from the "one connection per element" days of HTTP/1.0, by applying these tweaks you are simply going back to the 1.0 days.

It's also worth pointing out that there exists an Apache module and netfilter settings that could cause your additional connections to be blocked from the server, resulting in very slow page load times, broken images and possibly even a complete IP ban for this "flooding" behaviour. Please, stick with pipelining and do not touch these settings. There is a very good reason why they are not the default.

DarkPrime · Post by **DarkPrime** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:11 am

Yeah, what Dache said. I wouldn't recommend doing the second mod, the first one is more than enough.

Baba O'Reily · Post by **Baba O'Reily** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 6:25 am

I AM FLYING THROUGH THE INTERNETS!

Zeta · Post by **Zeta** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 4:23 pm

This really sucks on 56K. You get pages to load faster, but shittier and with more broken images and half-loaded pages.

How do I turn it off?

DarkPrime · Post by **DarkPrime** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 4:40 pm

Go back to the modded lines, right-click on them, and click "Reset".

That should do it.

Ash Holt · Post by **Ash Holt** » Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:29 pm

Turn on pipelining, turn off ipv6 support (not really widly supported, so it's not a problem to turn it off), and that's about it. Everything else doesn't really make a damn bit of difference, and could be detrimental.