Speed up web surfing in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid)

[Hamish Taylor]

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring one quick way to speed up your web browsing experience in the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Everyone wants to have a faster web browsing experience! In this short How-To I'm going to cover an easy way of doing this using the recently released Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid distribution.

My recommendation in this article is to install a proxy server on your local computer. This stores local copies (caching) of web sites on your computers hard drive.

When you surf to a site it checks the cache first and it it finds the page or image there, it loads directly from the local hard drive copy. This is much faster than downloading again from the Internet, especially if you don't have a fast connection speed and it has the added benefit of reducing downloads from the Internet.

To install and use this in Ubuntu 8.10 is incredibly simple. Go to the System menu, select Administration and then Synaptic Package Manager. Click on search and type in squid.

In the main part of the window, you'll need to go about two-thirds of the way down the page until you find squid. Right-click on it and select Mark for Installation. Click Apply. This will then install squid and any dependencies it has (squid-common from memory). As this is a relatively tiny application this really only takes a few seconds.

When this is done, go to Firefox and click on Edit, Preferences, Advanced, Network, Settings. Click on Manual proxy configuration, and type into the box marked "Http proxy" the word localhost. In the port number, type in 3128. You can also tick the "Use this proxy for all protocols box".

Now go to any website and see if it works. If it does then you have successfully installed squid! If you can't get websites to load, then please read onto Page 2 for two very simple troubleshooting tips and tricks.



Article Link at http://www.itwire.com/content/view/21727/1162/

[Joe Blogs]

Is this article an April Fool's joke? Installing a proxy server to make web pages load faster from cache? Get real banana peel. I will let you in on a not so secret piece of information Hamish. Firefox and Internet Explorer already cache pages so after you visit a site they load them from your hard drive rather than chewing up more bandwidth over your ISP connection. This helps greatly when you have only a 56K connection. I cannot understand why you did not know this. Shame on you. Maybe it is the Linux virus affecting your capacity to think rationally? Do not worry Hamish, because there is a cure for your ills coming soon. The medication is called Windows 7.

[Hamish Taylor]

Hi Joe Bloggs

Nope, not an April Fools Joke at all. I am perfectly aware that all browsers support internal caching. Caching of content can be significant for users of services with severely restricted download allowances or really slow Internet speeds, such as we see in Australia. I have given Ubuntu users an additional caching solution. Anyway, what problem do you have with speeding up caching even further?

Hamish

[Telic]

A further advantage of Squid is when you utilize multiple browsers -- e.g. both Firefox and Opera -- or when you have a PC network that shares a single Internet connection: Setting every browser to use the one Squid proxy configuration can enhance efficiency and security (e.g. to deny known "bad" sites or files).

[Joe Blogs]

Hamish, how will your solution, which requires additional setup by the end user, increase the browser performance above what the standard browser caching already provides? Simple answer, it won't provide any noticeable benefit. So all the extra setup is for what? Of course I have nothing against increasing a browser's performance, but I don't see your suggestion providing any tangible benefit over standard browser caching. Standard browser caching is more than adequate and standard browser caching is also customisable if a user wants to tweak the default settings.

[Hamish Taylor]

Standard browser caching is more than adequate

Actually, there are a number of well known issues with browser caches:
http://www.ie-vista.com/known_issues.html#cache
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/com ... opten.mspx
(and yes, I know that those are IE issues so not applicable to Ubuntu and/or GNU/Linux! just demonstrating a point)

Firefox:
http://particletree.com/notebook/firefo ... ng-issues/ (from 2005)
http://www.west-wind.com/Weblog/posts/469125.aspx (from 2008)

For an interesting and enlightening discussion on IE vs Firefox caching go here: http://blog.httpwatch.com/2008/10/15/tw ... e-caching/

Opera is not immune with this page stating that "A very large cache might also cause opera to take longer to start, if the cache is filled up." (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum118/478.htm)

If that's at all applicable to Firefox (which is not unreasonable) then the smaller the cache inside the application, the better. If you have an outside application, such as squid, to manage caching then you might actually get BETTER performance!

and standard browser caching is also customisable if a user wants to tweak the default settings.

So you'd rather that users go to about:config and start fiddling with:
browser.cache.check_doc_frequency
browser.cache.disk.capacity
print.always_cache_old_pres
urlclassifier.updatecachemax

and expect them to understand what those things are (I don't!!!) and what effect will happen if those values are changed?

Hamish

[Johan]

I think this is honestly the dumbest thing I've ever read on IT Wire (and there are plenty of dumb things).

Caching proxy's are there to provide *many* users access to locally cached content. In a single PC/single browser scenario the user is still going to have to download all the content at least once and by that time the majority of small images etc will be cached by the browser.

If you had to download a large amount of information multiple times from the same location I could see the use (well, sort of, why are you downloading the same information multiple times if it's not changing? Just save it somewhere), but how many times a day do you download that Ubuntu DVD ISO? You don't. You download the thing once and burn it or stick it on a disk somewhere.

Now, if you had a LAN at home with 5 or more regular users and you all went to the same websites you might get *some* cache hits, but certainly not enough to make any noticeable difference to your browsing speed and certainly not to your download quota.

Finally, I can't believe you think installing something as mature, large and complicated as squid is a better alternative to tweaking a couple of browser settings. Not to mention your advice for ticking "Use this proxy for all protocols" - how are you going to explain to all the users who follow this awful advice and indeed are on a dialup modem (as you seem to think that is who this will benefit) when you have suddenly broken everything else they do (SSL, Active FTP etc) because they need to hand-tweak 20 archaic squid settings and restart the daemon?

Who edits at IT Wire? How are they letting this utter drivel get out to the public?