This is aimed mostly at the
Linux users in the crowd. If you know of similar tricks for
Windows or
MacOS, please share them. This should speed up HTTP in general, but the biggest improvment is gained in places like
E2, where a lot of the content on each page is the same.
If you have enough system
RAM (128MB or more), turn the
memory cache in your
browser up to 16MB, and shut off the
disk cache. Install
Squid (the caching
HTTP proxy), not the
tentacled menace from "
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"). Another possibility is using squid in conjunction with the
Junkbuster, so your local cache of pages is banner-ad free. This didn't seem to help my speed much. Maybe squid had already cached the banners, so filtering them out didn't help. On a site like E2 with only a few banners, it seems to me that the junkbuster is going to be more trouble than its worth in terms of speed gained.
You can also set up
BIND on you local box, which will speed up frequently used
DNS queries. I'm considering adding this to my setup, but haven't yet out of
security
concerns.