I'm putting this in off topic because it's a public service announcement.
Most offices run all internet through a proxy just to make sure you're not fucking around at work. Things like facebook and myspace and tube8 are all blocked. That's fine and all since most people don't jack off at work anyway. The side effect of this is a much slower browsing experience because the proxy server adds a considerable amount of lag time to all requests.
At home, requests look like this:
ask website for data --> website sends data
At work, it's like this:
ask proxy for data --> proxy asks website for data --> website sends data to proxy --> proxy sends data to you
Using more connections at one time does not fix this lag because each of those connections is still high latency. The result of many connections is a page where it's loading in 10 pieces an all 10 of those pieces are loading slow, so it's basically trying to load the entire page at one time. Pipelining gets around this by sending multiple requests at one time and getting the results back as if it were 1 connection. Instead of 3 partially loaded images, you get image 1 then 2 then 3, all of which were requested at the same time. The page appears to load faster when pipelining is on because the top of the page loads immediately then all of the stuff lower down is loaded while you are looking at the top of the page.
Enabling pipelining is easy. In firefox, go to the address "about:config" and search for "pipe". One of the results will be "network.http.proxy.pipelining". Change that from false to true. Another one of the search results will be about the maximum number of requests. Feel free to play with that and see what works best. Default is 4, some people set that higher, I have it set to 500 because I like the idea of the work proxy getting hammered (firefox probably has a maximum well below 500)
Most offices run all internet through a proxy just to make sure you're not fucking around at work. Things like facebook and myspace and tube8 are all blocked. That's fine and all since most people don't jack off at work anyway. The side effect of this is a much slower browsing experience because the proxy server adds a considerable amount of lag time to all requests.
At home, requests look like this:
ask website for data --> website sends data
At work, it's like this:
ask proxy for data --> proxy asks website for data --> website sends data to proxy --> proxy sends data to you
Using more connections at one time does not fix this lag because each of those connections is still high latency. The result of many connections is a page where it's loading in 10 pieces an all 10 of those pieces are loading slow, so it's basically trying to load the entire page at one time. Pipelining gets around this by sending multiple requests at one time and getting the results back as if it were 1 connection. Instead of 3 partially loaded images, you get image 1 then 2 then 3, all of which were requested at the same time. The page appears to load faster when pipelining is on because the top of the page loads immediately then all of the stuff lower down is loaded while you are looking at the top of the page.
Enabling pipelining is easy. In firefox, go to the address "about:config" and search for "pipe". One of the results will be "network.http.proxy.pipelining". Change that from false to true. Another one of the search results will be about the maximum number of requests. Feel free to play with that and see what works best. Default is 4, some people set that higher, I have it set to 500 because I like the idea of the work proxy getting hammered (firefox probably has a maximum well below 500)
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