firefox issue

[Patrick Asselman]

On 2013-06-23 19:33, Gerhard Magnus wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 13.04 and the distribution's version of Firefox
> (21.0, Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu canonical - 1.0).
>
> Loading a webpage these days seems to involve an ever-increasing
> number of separate downloads, with the bottom left corner of the
> Firefox window flashing a succession of messages like "Connected
> to...", "Now loading...", "Waiting for..." etc. Often the browser
> seems to hang at whatever process is underlying one of these 
> messages.
> In most cases, such a hang eventually clears up on its own. But being
> impatient, I click the red "X" (stop loading this page) in the 
> address
> bar and then the arrow in the blue circle (reload current page) and
> the webpage immediately resumes loading.
>
> Any thoughts as to why this works? Is there a way to set Firefox to
> do it automatically?

It might be that the server you are trying to reach is busy on your 
first request, or takes a while to process complex scripts. So your 
connection is waiting for data from the web server but not getting any. 
It will keep on waiting until it times out (default setting for 
KeepAliveTimeout in Apache server is 15 secs). Now if you do a reload in 
your browser, it sends a new request. The new connection may get lucky 
and be answered more quickly. And the answer may already be in the 
server cache now, due to your previous request, making it even quicker.

Unfortunately for the server, you are now using twice the amount of 
resources because you have 2 connections going. But that is not really 
your problem, the server admin should take care of that bit. (By setting 
the timeout to a lower value for instance).

Best regards,
Patrick Asselman