Opera 10.53 slow loading pages, examples included, ?help with settings

Opera 10.53 slow loading pages, examples included, ?help with settings

Hello everyone,

I have recently switched to using Opera as my main browser from Firefox mainly to speed up my browsing. I am using Windows 7 x64.

However, I have found most pages load slowly with opera compared to Firefox and I am not sure why. I have tried unsuccessfully to search the forums for a solution.

To start, I have run the Peacekeeper benchmark and Opera IS twice as fast as Firefox on this test:

Peacekeeper Scores:
Opera: 8541
Firefox: 4141

However, Opera felt sluggish loading some common sites, so I decided to time them with Numion Stopwatch. I also tested these on two different PCs (using the same internet connection) and the results were similar.

Royal Bank
Loading Times: Opera - 4.243s, Firefox - 2.456s

Excite
Loading Times: Opera - 12.76s, Firefox - 4.908s

Microsoft
Loading Times: Opera - 5.909s, Firefox - 4.818s

ZDnet
Loading Times: Opera - 5.4s, Firefox - 2.615s

In fact, essentially all of the default test sites on Numion Stopwatch load faster on Firefox, except for maybe Google and Altavista which are essentially tied (because they both load so fast). I cannot understand the discrepancy between Opera's high Peacekeepers Benchmark and slow load times. I realize that Peacekeeper tests a lot of other things, but I would expect load times to be at least on par with Firefox.

I am assuming I need to adjust some Performance settings or something. However, any adjustments I have tried did not seem to help so I have set everything back to default values. I am NOT behing a proxy.

Any help on speeding up web page loading would be appreciated. I would also appreciate some explanations if there is no solution.

Thanks.

Well, after much searching on the Internet, I seem to have improved webpage load speeds by changing the following values:

opera:config
Performance
Network Buffer Size to 32 (128 Default)
Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections changed to unchecked
Everything else left at default values.

I also changed Preferenced>Advanced>Browsing>Loading to Redraw Instantly although I'm not sure if this affected load times much.

There seems to be much closer speeds to Firefox with the above changes, but some pages still load significantly slower.

I find that Opera seems to be "searching" for a webpage a lot after its entered into the address bar, particularly after clearing the cache. Yahoo.com sits at a blank screen sometimes and takes over 10s to load! Other times it loads in 3-4s, but there is still a delay which I don't see in Firefox. I think a lot of the webpage load times are inflated by this behaviour.

Any ideas on what settings can improve speeds to access webpages?

have memory cache set to auto and disk cache to 400MB and having the connections at default(16/64)and change your dns server to use opendns or googledns.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Unfortunately, those changes didn't seem to help things very much.

I went to completely different PC on a completely different network. I installed Firefox, Chrome and Opera and tested all 3 browsers on Numion Stopwatch. It still seems like Firefox loads the pages fastest, Chrome is second and Opera 3rd, although some pages load faster in either browser. Its just that on the pages Opera loads slower, it seems to load them A LOT slower.

For example, the Royal Bank page above seems to be abnormally slow compared to other browsers. Pay attention particularly to the two advertisement on the right side. On Firefox they load really quickly all of the time. On Opera, there is always a comparably long delay. Why is this? (Delete each browser's cache before testing).

BTW, if Chrome loads this page, it is super fast, in less than 2 seconds, but it sometimes hangs on the images on the right and you have to reload the page.

Here are some test results. Each page was loaded 3 times on each browser and the times were averaged. The cache of each browser was cleared before each test.

I found out after the fact I was using an older version of Firefox.

If you look at the fastest results for each browser, you can see some pages where Opera really struggles for some reason, while on other pages all browsers are pretty equal.

For example, Opera looks like it may load Yahoo.com the fastest, but all browser were able to load the page in about 3s.

Whereas Opera is clearly several seconds behind on the RBC and 24 Hr Entertainment pages


Opera Firefox Chrome
Version 10.53 3.59 4.1.249

Google
0.623 0.671 0.509
0.527 0.613 0.496
0.562 0.567 0.516
Avg 0.571 0.617 0.507

Yahoo
2.594 5.911 4.987
2.487 2.8 3.687
2.651 2.456 3.221
Avg 2.577 3.722 3.965

Altavista
0.507 0.355 0.424
0.519 0.267 0.224
0.216 0.275 0.286
Avg 0.414 0.299 0.311

Excite
11.236 5.44 4.754
10.836 11.854 4.325
11.101 5.402 4.1
Avg 11.058 7.565 4.393

Go
4.386 2.532 2.598
3.12 2.55 1.726
2.18 4.737 1.795
Avg 3.229 3.273 2.039

Microsoft
4.717 4.91 4.275
4.842 4.28 6.238
4.536 3.592 3.87
Avg 4.698 4.261 4.794

IMDB
1.244 1.495 1.226
1.285 1.75 1.69
1.253 1.25 1.489
Avg 1.261 1.498 1.468

Tucows
3.646 2.694 5.594
4.292 3.275 2.408
3.573 2.479 2.483
Avg 3.837 2.816 3.495

24-HR Entertainment
14.669 9.73 12.828
12.952 11.647 10.815
14.19 10.365 11.402
Avg 13.937 10.581 11.682

GameTrailers
5.836 4.273 3.7
4.817 5.389 5.714
4.918 3.934 3.506
Avg 5.190 4.532 4.307

RBC
5.924 3.24 1.62
4.93 2.254 1.19
5.42 1.996 1.305
Avg 5.425 2.497 1.377

NHL
4.246 4.92 3.949
8.861 7.975 6.136
4.343 7.87 4.599
Avg 5.817 6.922 4.895