Some speedup stuff for FireFox in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04)
If I could get to the Ubuntu Forums right now I’d link to the post that had these instructions. Maybe later.
Anyway, it had me set these to true in about:config
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
Then this was set to 30:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Note that this value is controversial since it can eat more bandwidth at once from a server. The default is 4, feel free to use that or any other low number you want.
Then it had me create this key:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Which was an integer value, set to 0.
Previously I already disabled ipv6 with this key:
network.dns.disableIPv6 set to true.
Lastly I used a modification of this great tip from tombuntu:
Added tmpfs /fftmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,size=100m,mode=1777 0 0 to /etc/fstab
Make sure you adjust the size to fit your needs. By default you only really need 50MB, or 50m, but I figured some padding is good. You can leave the size option off and it’ll default to half your RAM, but that’s a maximum number, not what it’ll always use.
Next I mounted that with sudo mount -a, after making /fftmp, then added this key to Firefox:
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory which was a string equal to /fftmp.
The result? So far a really snappy Firefox.
Edit: Looking at this a couple of days ago I realized that I made some basic mistakes and never corrected myself. For a regular user app it would be best to place the mount point under a user’s home directory, and in the options make sure to specify at least the uid, and possibly the gid as well. So, my example above would be something like this-
tmpfs /home/gump/fftmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,size=100m,uid=1000,gid=1000,mode=1777 0 0
Make sure you know your uid/gid since it isn’t always going to be 1000.