HowTo: Decrease Page Load Times

Mike Skinner — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:54:00 +0000

Whilst working on the weekend, I found that the number of simultaneous requests I could make to a web server was limited by my web browser – severely.

I have one Linux server, performing port forwarding for our overseas offices (mostly so they can use Remote Desktop).

I had developed a PHP page to display whether a connection could be opened on each of the forwarded ports. A connection attempt would be tried against each port sequentially, however this caused the page to load very slowly – especially since some requests were making a round trip from the UK to Australia.

On the weekend I upgraded the page to use a very small AJAX library I wrote. Although the page loaded quickly, the statuses returned from each AJAX request were slow.

Although the browser settings I ended up tweaking will not make the aforementioned page load faster (unless all users make these changes), it does make web pages load faster in general.

Firefox

Enter into the address bar:
about:config
Then filter on the string:
connections
Change the value of network.http.max-connections to 64
Change the value of network.http.max-connections-per-server to 32
Change the value of network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 8

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Create a new text file and save it with a .reg extension.
Paste into this file the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
“MaxConnectionsPerServer”=dword:00000010
“MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server”=dword:0000010

Save the reg file.
Double click on it to import the updated settings.

Please note that a logoff or reboot may be required after altering the registry. If you are unsure about modifying your registry, please Google these settings first as I will not be held liable for any adverse consequences for these instructions.

In retrospect, I remember using a Firefox extension called Fasterfox in the past, however I would rather keep my extension list short.

Long ago, Mosaic and Netscape allowed users to configure the maximum number of connections. Here is a screenshot I took for you old timers ;-)

futuretrack5

HowTo: Decrease Page Load Times