Faster web browsing on high latency connections
marcus
2 Jan 2008 08:23
Just a small tips for you who have an internet connection with high latency (via satellite, tunneled on a 3g net etc). It might be painful to surf the web even if the bandwidth show reasonable numbers.
When you load a web page, (simplified) the browser normally loads some kind of html and then it loads the files your page needs one by one that aren't in your cache.
Loading anything on TCP/IP requires the downloading side to send acknowledge packages to assure the sender that it really has received a package. TCP can only have 64kB of unacknowledged data and then http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~vwelch/net_perf/tcp_windows.html. This is what makes high latency high bandwidth internet access appear slow.
The easy solution is to make the web browser download files in parallel. If you're using http://www.mozilla.com/, please go to url about:config. This page shows the internal settings of FireFox; it's like RegEdit of FireFox.
Enter...
network.http
...in the filter at the top.
Make sure...
network.http.pipelining
...is set to true.
Make sure...
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
...is set to say 4.
This also makes some good on low latency connections but the difference is not so extreme.
Best of luck,
Marcus
When you load a web page, (simplified) the browser normally loads some kind of html and then it loads the files your page needs one by one that aren't in your cache.
Loading anything on TCP/IP requires the downloading side to send acknowledge packages to assure the sender that it really has received a package. TCP can only have 64kB of unacknowledged data and then http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~vwelch/net_perf/tcp_windows.html. This is what makes high latency high bandwidth internet access appear slow.
The easy solution is to make the web browser download files in parallel. If you're using http://www.mozilla.com/, please go to url about:config. This page shows the internal settings of FireFox; it's like RegEdit of FireFox.
Enter...
network.http
...in the filter at the top.
Make sure...
network.http.pipelining
...is set to true.
Make sure...
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
...is set to say 4.
This also makes some good on low latency connections but the difference is not so extreme.
Best of luck,
Marcus