I ran accross these hacks or tweaks for Netscape and FireFox users that can greatly speed up its loading of pages. By default pipelining is disabled on both of these browsers so it loads data streams one at a time when building a page but if you have a braodband connection and enable it it can make pages load noticably faster. You will find instructions in the link below on how to easily apply these tweaks if you are interested in trying it. I use it and it makes pages load almost instantly here at times. Enjoy.

Click Here

 

This has been a menu item in Opera for quite some time. 8 is the max I'd set it to.

Don't change the number to 16 or 32, you'll find your IP auto-banned from FTE when you slam the server each time you fetch a page. Using those instructions creates a very server unfriendly browser. Firefox users rarely stop to realize their tweaks have an impact on the sites they browse. For instance, we block Firefox page pre-fetching.

 

Opera is my baby. I got prompted to download version 9 yesterday. WOOT!

Ryan

 

Let your mouse hover over a tab on Opera 9.... watch the magic.

No doubt this will be copied by Firefox in a future version, like every other neat UI enhancement they take from Opera!

 

This mod does not do anything to prefetch settings, It only allows or enables multiple requests to be handled at once when loading a page and I do question the logic that it is slamming because to load a page you have to retrieve all of the needed data and you can string it out or get it all at once. ALso if you string it out that means that your server has to handle more potenail client connections at a time (more IP addresses) to stream data to rather than getting in and out quickly and make best usage of availble bandwidth and CPU cycles. It would be interresting to do a server load test to see which is more efficent because logic tends to suggest that getting over with quickly reduces server overhead because it has less IP's to route data too at any given time on the average when clients get in and out quickly. Also there is the ISP to because they may actaully prefetch you pages and when you enable multiple requests you may acaually be getting it faster from your ISP (that has gotten it from your site) so this adds even more "smoke" to this equation because different ISP's do some things differently.

 

I just downloaded V9 today.... and THAT IS COOL!!!

 

I know. I was using pre-fetch as another example of user's lack of knowledge of the technical matters impacting servers.

Hitting our server with 16 or 32 requests at once, when it can only handle a finite number at a given time is not server friendly.

Your logic doesn't taken into account that it takes CPU cycles to spawn additional server threads and requires more RAM (which even at 4 gig is a limited resource that is best used for disk caching). If a client uses a limited number of connections and reuses them with the HTTP 1.1 protocol the server load is much lower. I've seen both types of crawling with Yahoo and Google crawlers and the load is lower when they reuse connections verses having more of them.

ISP pre-fetching is a non-issue to FTE, we block that as well, as well as set headers that avoid public pooling of pages by an ISP (allowing it would be a minor security issue with forum logins). We do allow ISP pooling of images.