I created a patch that allows people to change the default buffer sizes that our networking layer uses when loading content from the web. The hope here is not so much to get this patch into the tree (it would be nice, but the patch isn’t ready for primetime), but rather to ask you to take a look at the build with this feature, tweak the values, and send me some feedback. Be sure to take a look at the comments in the bug, specifically concerns about a balance between user perceived performance and clock time performance. Simply taking the values that result in the fastest page loading (clock time) may not be the right values for human beings watching the content be loaded.
Here are the builds. (these are experimental builds).
To change the values, edit all.js:
pref("network.default.buffer.size", 16384);
pref("network.default.buffer.count",32);
The defaults in Firefox are 4096 and 16 respectfully. You probably can change these values via about:config (and the patch doesn’t prevent you), but that may be bad.
One Comment
It would be helpful to measure these changes on different devices with specific benchmarks, otherwise you’ll just get people changing them to random values and making unreliable claims. [See: various "firefox tweak guides" that do this with various prefs.]