In Windows, check settings in the Internet Options control panel, to reduce the time taken by Internet Explorer to launch and load pages.
If you have a firewall or NAT Router, check that it permits ICMP Echo Requests to be received and ICMP Echo Responses to be sent: see Stealth-mode firewalls considered harmful below.
If your browser does not support HTTP Persistent Connections, the latencies in downloading web pages with many embedded images can be reduced by increasing the maximum allowed simultaneous HTTP connections to each server, by a registry setting which is documented in http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q183/1/10.ASP and is described in a slightly more user-friendly way at http://registry.winguides.com/display.php/536, and at http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_registry_advanced.shtml. The default maximum number of HTTP connections is 2 per server (or 4 for HTTP/1.0 servers), and these can increased slightly with good effect. But diminishing returns soon set in, especially as (a) some servers limit the number of HTTP connections that can be handled at the server end, and (b) all these HTTP connections will be competing for the same fixed bandwidth between your browser and the server. You should certainly increase the 2 to 4, but it is probably not worth going much above 8, unless experiment proves that it is worth it.
For Apple Macintosh, the maximum HTTP connections in MSIE can be set as follows:
Return to Index.