Open Firefox’s advanced settings menu by running about:config from the address bar. Upon entering this address, you will see a long list of internal settings. Modify the following ones and set them to the suggested values shown here for maximum performance:
network.http.keep-alive.timeout:600
(300ms default is OK usually, but 600 is better.)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy:16
(default is 4)
network.http.pipelining:true
(default- false. Some old HTTP/1.0 servers can’t handle it.)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests:8
(no default)
network.http.proxy.keep-alive:true
(default- true, but double check)
network.http.proxy.pipelining:true
(default- false) – see NOTE 1 below.
Then restart the browser and experience the difference!
For some automated additional performance hacks, check out the FasterFox extension. You also can do the same tweaks manually with the help of this page.
NOTE 1: proxy pipelining may not be well supported by Privoxy. For this reason, you may want to install Polipo and use that instead to get the performance benefits of pipelining. If you use Torbutton (which you should, if you want any anonymity at all), all of the Tor-relevant privacy
scrubbing features of Privoxy are no longer necessary.
NOTE 2: Do not use page prefetching. Disable this if it is enabled. Prefetching is a speculative feature, which assumes that you will read the pages referenced by the links in the current page you are viewing. This places undue load on the Tor network and clogs your circuits with unnecessary traffic. It’s unlikely you will read all the pages referenced by the current page, especially in the case of search engines results.
This page is based Mike Schrenk’s talk at the CIJ Summer School – July 2009.