a better explanation
There are a lot of blog posts out there telling people that they can dramatically improve Firefox's performance by making certain tweaks in about:config. It's worth saying up front that the default settings are the way they are for a reason. The Mozilla team is not secretly trying to deprive you of additional performance. A good example is pipelining, which isn't supported by all web servers. Not only is it not universally supported, but because of the architecture of this feature set, it's not possible for Firefox to only use it when it is available. That being said, if you know what you're doing and you do see a performance boost, I say go for it. Just don't complain if you experience problems as a result.
So, what promoted this post? It was Egon's post titled The Truth About the Firefox "Pipelining" Trick. That post is one of the more sane explanations I've seen in recent months and if you're interested in Firefox and pipelining, it's worth your time to read it.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
Years ago, Opera implemented heuristics for detecting whether a server supports pipelining or not. As you say, the HTTP protocol does not include any reliable way of finding out, so detection is tricky. Mozilla should try something similar though, if you think you're really good at what you do.
Posted by: Jere | May 26, 2007 1:34 PM
I think the author of the post is confusing network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests in the paragraph about hitting servers too hard. (Though I'd think opening too many connections not only hits servers too hard, but it also slows things down because of the overhead of opening all those TCP connections.)
Posted by: David Baron | May 26, 2007 10:23 PM
I have used pipelining for many years without any problems, except for 1 particular site (which didn't work correctly without it anyway). I guess that FF's heuristics are good enough. Also, I haven't see many cases logged in Bugzilla where the fault was due to pipelining. Why don't we switch it on by default ? The performance difference can be very large.
Posted by: Jo Hermans | May 27, 2007 12:31 PM
Well atleast servers aren't hit hard like googles prefecting/speed tool did a while back.
btw.. "reactions, thoughs, comments, etc." is this on purpose? :p
Posted by: a | May 28, 2007 7:57 PM
well now.. bolding text really makes it blindedly standout.. whoops
Posted by: a | May 28, 2007 7:58 PM
Typo. Fixed. Thanks for the catch.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | May 28, 2007 8:22 PM