Optimizing Page Load Time

Optimizing Page Load Time

" *Neither IE nor Firefox ship with HTTP pipelining enabled by default. This means each request has to be answered and its connection freed up before the next request can be sent. This incurs average extra latency of the round-trip (ping) time to the user divided by the number of connections allowed. Or if your server has HTTP keepalives disabled, doing another TCP three-way handshake adds another round trip, doubling this latency.

* By default, IE allows only two outstanding connections per hostname when talking to HTTP/1.1 servers or eight-ish outstanding connections total. Firefox has similar limits. Using up to four hostnames instead of one will give you more connections. (IP addresses don't matter; the hostnames can all point to the same IP.)

* Most DSL or cable Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth, at rates like 1.5Mbit down/128Kbit up, 6Mbit down/512Kbit up, etc. Ratios of download to upload bandwidth are commonly in the 5:1 to 20:1 range. This means that for your users, a request takes the same amount of time to send as it takes to receive an object of 5 to 20 times the request size. Requests are commonly around 500 bytes, so this should significantly impact objects that are smaller than maybe 2.5k to 10k. This means that serving small objects might mean the page load is bottlenecked on the users' upload bandwidth, as strange as that may sound."

http://www.die.net/musings/page_load_time/

Great, but how the heck is all that done and how long will it take a PC clueless like me to accomplish that stuff?

If you are running windows... You can try this group of links:

www.speedguide.net

And specifically this program that will set your TCP/IP parameters to your connection type (seems to work fine on Windows XP Home):

TCP/IP Optimizer (Download Program--No Spam/Spyware via my tools noted)

I am on cable modem and I cannot say if the above have really helped or not on my older laptop--but it is pretty quick on downloads and painting webpages (especially with the new FireFox 2.0).

If you have FireFox--In the Address Bar (where you type URL's), type "about:config" (without the ""'s).

In the filter, you can type "connection" and see a couple of the settings mentioned above:

network.http.max-connections (default=24)
network.http.max-connections-per-server (default=8)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server (default=2)

From what I remember reading a few years ago, the default settings are not defined by any standards committee. You can try changing them yourself and see how it affects your load speed--Although, setting them too high will probabably just flood the host server with requests and not do much to speed your downloads.

-Bill

If you are using Firefox, you can download the updated version of the Fasterfox extension. I believe it has been updated to work with Firefox 2.0 within the last day or so.

Fasterfox allows you to change speed settings easily from an interface, so that you don't have to mess with the config settings directly.

And it does work...although 2.0 is significantly faster than previous versions all on its own.