firefox issue

[Gerhard Magnus]

On 06/24/2013 11:52 PM, Patrick Asselman wrote:
> 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
>
>
Thanks for the response -- how servers work (or don't work so well) is 
very interesting to me. Once I'm connected to a "slow" or perhaps very 
busy server, any subsequent downloading is very fast. Your comments 
suggest that buying more speed for my Internet connection from the 
telephone company probably won't help the situation.