melbourne chapter

Seems everybody wants a turbo nowdays, so what about boosting your browser? This is where pipelining comes into play. You see normally HTTP requests are issued sequentially but with HTTP/1.1 pipelining multiple HTTP requests can made without waiting for the corresponding responses. The client then waits for the responses to arrive in the order in which they were requested. Pipelining the requests can result in a dramatic improvement in page loading times especially over a broadband connection. Below are some settings you may wish to try out (at your own risk). If you are uncomfortable with changing these settings I recommend using the Fasterfox Add-on by Tony Gentilcore.

Enabling Pipelining in Firefox

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”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

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” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

For more information on pipelining please visit the Mozilla FAQ