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Firefox 7 takes forever to load some pages, or don't load completely, have place markers in place of images..

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Had same problems with Ff 6. 1/4 to 1/3 of pages take forever to load. Sometimes I can make them by highlighting URL and hitting Enter. Sometimes the activity indicator just spins and spins and page never loads. Sometimes place markers appear where images should be. New York Times homepage, for example, partially loads (some missing images) but links from it take forever.

Had same problems with Ff 6. 1/4 to 1/3 of pages take forever to load. Sometimes I can make them by highlighting URL and hitting Enter. Sometimes the activity indicator just spins and spins and page never loads. Sometimes place markers appear where images should be. New York Times homepage, for example, partially loads (some missing images) but links from it take forever.

Chosen solution

Open the about:config page via the location bar and do a search for network.http via the Filter at the top of the about:config page.
You can reset all network.http related prefs that appear bold (user set) via the right-click context menu to their default values.

It is usually not a good idea to change such prefs and such changes can have the reverse effect, especially enabling pipelining for servers that do not support that feature.

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All Replies (10)

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Chosen Solution

Open the about:config page via the location bar and do a search for network.http via the Filter at the top of the about:config page.
You can reset all network.http related prefs that appear bold (user set) via the right-click context menu to their default values.

It is usually not a good idea to change such prefs and such changes can have the reverse effect, especially enabling pipelining for servers that do not support that feature.

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Usually I'd agree with cor-el's advice....it's usually manually-entered values that cause issues. But...

I was experiencing this particular problem and after exhausting all options, posted in the mozillaZine support forum where someone actually suggested that I change the network.http.max-connections setting in about:config from the default value of 256 to 48.

This resolved the issue for me.

After looking into it more myself, it turns out that for this setting Firefox 5 has a default value of 30, while Firefox 6 & 7 (the two versions I've had trouble with) have default values of 256.

I know that being able to make more simultaneous connections can improve page loading times, so I tried some other values. 128 didn't work for me, but 64 does, so I left it at that.

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I hadn't noticed that the default of network.http.max-connections has been increased from 30 to 256 and in that case it will indeed help to set that to a more modest value of 30 if you have a slow connection.

The network.http.max-connections-per-server hasn't changed and is still 15.

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I found that several network.http settings had been changed, as cor-el suggested might be the problem. I believe an optimization program I use, Advanced System Care, had changed these settings when I allowed it to "optimize" Firefox. I reset all to default and this helped a lot - about half the sites I had problems loading were fixed, but not all. Then tried edamame's suggestion. My problem now is that when I restarted Firefox, all of the values that I had reset to default (mostly having to do with pipelining) AND the max.connections setting all reverted to the altered values! Why would they do this and how do I stop it so settings remain default? I really appreciate the suggestions and feel this is close to getting solved

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Thank you so much cor-el and edamame. Problem was user.js file which I removed and now everything is zippy again.

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You're welcome

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[Rant and personal attack removed by moderator. Please read Mozilla Support rules and guidelines and remember that this forum is for helping people, thanks. If you need help and are not the person who started this thread, please use https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/new where volunteers can get more details about your setup.]

Modified by Chris Ilias

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Hi, according to your conclusion , I did set up network.http.max-connections to 32, I tried 64,96,128, 160, 192 but again it started slowing down my FF7.1 again. Default value (reset) = 256

Since I modify network.http.max-connections to 32 ; it seems FF7.1 is now quicker too, on my Windows 7 PC I mean.

I did try many configurations, so far 32 seems a good choice, even if my Broadband connection seems good (12,97 Mbit/s (1,62 Mo/s) ) ; more than 96 max-connections makes my FF7.1 very buggy.

Thanks for sharing.

Modified by jmayeux

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48 seems to be the highest setting for network.http.max-connections before problems may arise.