Browsing Speed

[seekermeister]

It's not that the speed of page loading is so slow, but I changed my connection speed yesterday with my ISP to double that which I had before, yet I don't see any difference in how rapidly a page loads with any of my browsers. When downloading a file, it does load twice as fast as before.

This caused my to reflect on how I reset the port speed settings in XP, using the Recovery Console and the ems redirect to 115200 (dialup days), even though it was set to this within the Device Manager already. I had a number of people on another forum tell me that it would make no difference, but it did. As I understood, MS had written it in such a manner that it overrode this setting, because they thought it would slow dissemination of certain viruses, etc. on the internet.

The fact that page loading remains the same, despite the increase in speed of my connection makes me wonder if there is anything in W7 that might have the same effect?

 

[TGSoldier]

Good question. I've been looking for an answer similar to this. Hope we get a response.

 

[richc46]

There are many sites that you can use to check your speed. I have found that, although, my speed is suppose to be slower DSL, than my friend, Cable, there is no real, noticeable change in speed. This is probably due to internet traffic etc.

Although you guys probabluy know about this site, already, it is one of the best to ck, speed.

http://speedtest.net/index.php

 

[seekermeister]

That is the first place that I went after changing the speed, and it does show that the speed is doubled as it should be, but that does not translate into a speed increase for page loading.

EDIT: I also expected an improvement in streaming video, like Hulu and TVU Player, but they are as before, especially with the latter, because I often get distorted, blotchy scenes in films. Hulu is better, but sometimes the video will freeze momentarily. I had thought that these problems were due to connection speed.

 

[RogerR]

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

 

[whs]

The speed you "buy" from the ISP relates to up- and download. That has no impact on your browsing speed which depends much more on the number of hoops you have to jump to get to your webpage. Go into cmd and Ping the websites, then you will know how fast they respond. E.g. try this one :

Ping www.yahoo.com

You have to run cmd as admin.

 

[Guy with a Colt]

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

You could try to flush the DNS by doing the following. This may not solve the problem.

Click the start button > All Programs > Accressories.
Right click "Command Prompt" select "Run As Administrator"
Confirm and Accept confirmation pop ups.

Type in the following
ipconfig /flushdns now press enter.

It will look like this when finished
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

You can now close the Command Prompt window.

 

[RogerR]

That's not what I mean;

DNS Benchmark

 

[seekermeister]

I went back to Google DNS, because even though DNS Benchmark says that it is slower than the fastest (Cox), I'm getting somewhat faster page loading with it, but it still is not as fast as I would expect. The best that I remember, it is performing exactly the same with this DNS as it was before increasing my connection speed.

I may be wrong, but I'm still looking for some kind of tweak within W7. I still have a feeling that there is some kind of governor built in.

 

[seekermeister]

Have you tried using a different DNS server? If your new faster connection is running through your same old ISPs cache and filter, maybe there is a bottleneck there. Worth testing anyway.

You could try to flush the DNS by doing the following. This may not solve the problem.

Click the start button > All Programs > Accressories.
Right click "Command Prompt" select "Run As Administrator"
Confirm and Accept confirmation pop ups.

Type in the following
ipconfig /flushdns now press enter.

It will look like this when finished
Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

You can now close the Command Prompt window.

I just tried this, and I did find a noticeable increase in speed loading some pages here on the forum. Now I will have to wait to see how long this effect lasts. I had thought that caching DNS addresses should speed up browsing, instead of slowing it. If this does prove to be the answer, how would one set the ipconfig to routinely flush the cache, without me trying to remember to do it myself?

 

[win7clutz]

I’ve been testing various DNS servers and find that in testing the top 20 servers, they have little effect on how fast pages load.

With that said, I narrow it down to choice of browsers. Although I’m not interested in starting a Browser War, testing over the past few weeks suggest the following:

#1 Opera
#2 Chrome
#3 Firefox
#4 IE8

Therefore I now default to Opera and continually impressed with the results.

EDIT: One more thing, I test broadband speed here, my results are close to identical regardless of the browser I'm testing with, so once again that tells me that page load time is browser related.

 

[whs]

I really did not really notice any differenc (do not use FF though). Maybe because my Win7 is on a SSD. But I also like Opera for various other reasons.

 

[pparks1]

Normally, your browsing speed is not impacted by upgrading your download speeds...as the landing page for most web pages are pretty small and are coming nowhere near the speed limit of your ISP.

Changing your DNS server to a faster one often provides the biggest bang for the buck as your browser has to lookup each and every website that you go to...so the faster it can get that answer the faster your browser times will be. In fact, if you want the fastest speeds possible, you could install your own caching DNS system on your own home LAN and your lookups could be provided right from this local server which could then forward to external DNS servers for any queries that are not already in it's cache. But my guess is the expense and hassle of maintaining this would exceed the benefits provided.

 

[jav]

I agree with pparks1.

After some internet speed, browsing speed mostly affected by DNS.