Does the "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" preference works with KM. If yes, what it is the its default value?
Thanks in advance.

Do You look for something like spead tweaks?

I am sure initialpaint did work in the past since 2004 or so , ca. 250 (millisconds) is the default, a reasonable value used by mozilla.org. The docu You linked says it has an effect on all SeaMonkey GRE. I am currently not using this pref but it should work.

It is not among current K-Meleon 1.5.x default prefs but must be created.
You can just create the key and try - if the GRE does not know it anymore there is no speed penalty.

If it still works it would be worth to set to zero when You visit text based pages or have a fast connection.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/26/2010 05:31PM by guenter.

It works, I set mine to 100msec. You want a minimum of reflows but no extra delays, so it depends on your connection latency.

OK, thanks for your replies, I will try 1000 ms, because I'm not looking for speed but for performance.

what other performance can one look for besides speed? ? ?

i think you may misunderstand what this setting does. a 1 second paint delay means the browser waits 1 second for information to come in from servers before it even tries to compose the page layout. You would have a rather unresponsive browser there, and unless you have horrible connection, you can do much better than this.

setting it too short will mean that as server information comes in, the browser will have to recompose ( reflow ) the layout resulting in a rapidly rearranging page. which is just as annoying as an unneeded delay, since you can't start reading it anyway if it's moving all over the place.

I thought that the data received started to be displayed after a second. Thats why I talked about performance, you let the browser receive the data, and then display it. Instead of trying to to do both, retrieving from the net and showing to you the results at the same time.
I have changed the value to 100ms to test how it goes.

it's not so much a processor load issue as you have no control over the delay a server takes to serve whatever data is on it. if you ping your typical hosts, you can get an idea of the network delay. it's usually less than 100ms for close sites, more like 300ms for international access. you then add the random delay it takes for the server computers to put your data out in random order. as the page elements come in, perhaps fr0m different servers, the browser gets size info and calculates how to layout the page.
<rant>
and then there is always the idiot web programmer who doesn't bother to shrink the jpeg image to the correct size before placing it on the server - resulting in a tiny image that takes 15seconds to load = and they also forget to specify the size in the webpage, causing the browser to wait to reformat it. look at the netflix login page for an example, at least this graphic has its size specified so the page doesn't reflow.
</rant>

anyway, set paintdelay to zero to see how annoying this reflowing can be, especially on sites with lots of elements and ads. if your machine is fast enough, you'll see it constantly rearranging the page to fit everything in. you might need to change some rendering settings to get it to do this, I can give you the details.

My computer is slow, 11 years old. My internet connection is fast but not stable, because it comes from the same wires as the telephone, and if there is wind or rain, the download speed is affected.
Currently some pages do not load at the first try, and I need to Refresh the page to see them. I think that it is a connection issue.