Comments on: The Truth About the Firefox “Pipelining” Trick

By: az

az — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:12:57 +0000

@jon, and whoever has the same problem: You probably have a high-bandwidth application open at the same time (P2P or several HTTP downloads or whatever). Disabling network.http.keep-alive does the trick. It seems that a packet missing due to TCP throttling may block a connection, and with pipelining that means that up to 8 requests will not be resent until the connection times out.

Also, keep in mind that the speedup by pipelining is roughly proportional to bandwith * latency

By: Frank

Frank — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 09:13:30 +0000

I changed as you directed and websites are loading much more faster than normal

Thanks for this article i will add it to my blog once its ready

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:08:12 +0000

I just tried this using Google image searches. Without pipelining, the pages loaded in an average of about 2.75 seconds. With pipelining, the average was about 2.25 seconds. Subjectively, the delay before the first image loaded seemed about the same, but the delay between the first image loaded and all images were loaded seemed much shorter.

By: egon

egon — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:16:54 +0000

Glad I could help Richard I’m all too familiar with the situation you provided.

By: Richard Bello

Richard Bello — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:26:30 +0000

O god… I am so sick of people all over the internet writing articles, and making videos tutorials with incorrect info about the network.http.pipelining.maxrequests hack…

——————
12 year old who knows nothing about computers writes: “Hey…What if i set it to a high number like 100?

Idiot who copied and pasted the tutorial from another idiot writes: Wow IDK, i should try that, It would be super fast!

12 year old writes back: I am such 1337 hacker.
——————-

I so happy to finally get this info from someone who knows what they are talking about… Thanks

By: Daniel

Daniel — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:00:20 +0000

Wow luckly i read your article because the nglayout.initialpaint.delay that i had set to 0 was slowing down the websites from full load. I booted that and its super fast. Thanks

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:41:42 +0000

I don’t know what all the hype is about, but I tried FF3 on my computer and it’s not as fast as expected. When I recently upgraded Internet Explorer 7 to IE7 PRO (you could call it Internet Explorer 7.5), it now loads pages as fast as FF3, has many of the FF features, and downloads faster. I am now enjoying IE7 PRO better than FF3.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:35:04 +0000

I am setting my pipeline value to 60. Will that possibly further enhance the browser speed on Firefox 3?

By: schatten

schatten — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:22:45 +0000

Seems a little bit faster. I am using FF 3, didn’t notice a great difference yet, but may I will see it soon. Keep on testing it.

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By: jon

jon — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:21:17 +0000

I enabled pipelining a while back.
Over time I noticed that some graphics sites, with thumbnails, weren’t loading properly – - many thumbnails wouldn’t load, unless I refreshed a couple of times.
If I switched to IE, everything would load normally.
So, one day the light bulb went off, and I disabled pipelining. And voila, all thumbnails now load normally.
I’ve tried adjusting the number, even down to 2, but some thumbnails still wouldn’t load.
I don’t know why this happens, but now I have pipelining disabled… and all’s well.

By: inhahe

inhahe — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:43:24 +0000

It only improves speed noticeably in certain situations. If you have to download many small files from a website (and it supports pipelining for that server), it will improve the speed drastically. After I enabled pipelining loading pages of thumbnails in MySpace or DeviantArt was shockingly faster.

By: egon

egon — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:37:59 +0000

Thanks for the comment parviziyi. The problem with Pipelining is that it’s so dependent on so many factors, some people see a big difference, and some see nothing.

Personally, the difference I’ve seen was minimal, but there none-the-less.

Of course, there is also the possibility of the placebo effect on a lot of people as well, and that’s fine too.

By: parviziyi

parviziyi — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:08:24 +0000

When I enabled pipelining in Firefox there was no perceptable improvement in speed. I think the improvement must be small, if it exists. Anybody claiming to report “The Truth About the Firefox Pipelining Trick” must state how much faster downloads are with the pipelining enabled and this report doesn’t do so. For the man to crow “I love this feature, and use it to it’s fullest” without quantifying what difference it makes, sounds like snake oil salesmanship to me.

By: BarryW

BarryW — Thu, 22 May 2008 11:30:10 +0000

Just moved from FF 2.0.0.14 to 3.0 RC1 – it’s very fast even without the pipelining tweak.

Enabled pipelining and works very well with most websites except banking sites it seems.

Suggest you try logging into your bank account with pipelining enabled to see what happens.

My bank site jams up with pipelining enabled so I’ve gone back to the default mode.

The rendering speed of FF 3.0 should help the speed freaks – currently 10x faster than IE7.