good explanation on what `network.http.pipelining` and `network.http.proxy.pipelining` and `nglayout.initialpaint.delay` do?

Question

regarding this link: http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=481870&sid=943fe94a18bf20daa2a7fd18e13b21a1

I find it dubious.. and anyway i was wondering if anyone could give a good explanation on what network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining and nglayout.initialpaint.delay do?

Answer 1

It's mostly accurate information. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining explains the first two options - http pipelining is a feature that allows multiple requests to be transmitted in http 1.1 before any responses are received from the server. The greater the network latency, the more this will help - but not all servers support pipelining, and those that do may have breakage either within the server itself or within application code. However, the vast majority of sites do work correctly, making this a good thing to try in order to improve performance - just don't forget it's there if something breaks later.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Nglayout.initialpaint.delay is a bit more dubious - setting it to 0 is probably bad advice, but other values may work. Reducing this will allow some content to display more quickly, but the first bits of content that are received when loading the page are generally not enough yet to be worth rendering, and reducing this could actually have the opposite effect, by increasing the number of page reflows before the page is fully rendered. The default value is a reasonable compromise that fits most circumstances. You can play with higher or lower values here and see if performance improves since the optimal value is a balance of network latency, perceived latency of the initial rendering, and actual page load time for the full page.