Posted by: kurtsh | December 20, 2007

HOWTO: Speed up IE’s Web page loading by increasing the max number of connections

This is an old hack and it’s well documented all over the place so I don’t feel so bad about cutting & pasting the content but nonetheless it was taken from Computerworld.

By default, IE allows only two simultaneous download sessions from a single Web server. This can affect the speed of your Web browsing, because you’re not able to simultaneously download all the objects that make up a Web page, so the page displays more slowly. If you could force IE to download more objects at once, Web pages would display more quickly.

A tweak to the Windows Registry does the trick. With this tweak, you can force IE to use more than two simultaneous sessions. A good number is 10. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Run the Registry Editor by typing regedit at a command line or in the Windows Vista Start Search box.
  2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftware
    MicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion
    Internet Settings.
  3. Choose Edit –> New –> DWORD Value.
  4. Create a new DWORD value called MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server, and give it a value of 10.
  5. Choose Edit –> New –> DWORD Value, create another DWORD value called MaxConnectionsPerServer, and give it a value of 10.
    (Note: If you want to experiment with fewer or more than 10 simultaneous connections, change the value in both DWORD values accordingly.)
  6. Exit the Registry and close IE. When you restart IE, the new value will be in effect and your Web browsing should speed up.

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