Opera pages loading very slow compared to other browsers such as Firefox/Chrome? Then look here for a fix!

After installing a bunch of ‘extensions/plugins’ for Chrome, I found my Opera running super slow. It was loading pages very slowly compared to other browsers if I was using more then one window. The weird thing is, it was working fine just yesterday. After about half a day, I started to get pretty frustrated. If I was playing a Youtube video for example, nothing else would load until the video was finished playing. This was highly frustrating and I was about to do a reinstall very shortly. However, I found out there are config options with opera. Before you remove Opera or use another browser as your main browser due to plain frustration, give this a try. (This has been a common these past few weeks apparently too.)

1. Open a new TAB/WINDOW. Type in opera:config
2. Find the Performance dropdown box, near the bottom. Click it to have it display a bunch of new options.
3. Make sure the settings are as follows for standard performance:
Enable Pipeline - Checked
HTTP Error Strategy - 2
Max Connections Server - 16
Max Connections Total - 64
Network Buffer Size - 32
No Connection Keepalive - Unchecked
Non-Compliant Server 100 Continue - Unchecked
Reduce Max Persistent HTTP Connections - Unchecked
Synchronous DNS Lookup - Unchecked
4. Hit save. Restart browser. Done. With these settings you should be able to browse at optimal speed with Opera!  A suggestion would be to set the Network Buffer to 64 or 128 if you have a slow (Non DSL/CABLE) connection. This is also a small performance boost over the default settings.

The weird thing is, when I went to view these settings, Max connections total/Max connections server were set to 1. Basically this means something was tampering with Opera’s settings. I am not sure if it WAS the extensions that I was installing, but something was defiantly modifying the settings without my consent in the past day, and I can’t point any fingers becuase I simply do not know. However, it does seem like a ‘browser modification’ attempt to piss off the user. After changing these settings, Opera was happy again, and pages are blazing fast again.

So give these a try if recently you are having troubles with Opera pages loading slow. This should fix those speed issues!

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  1. Opera and Youtube (Google) video playback issue (As of April 14th) – Fix

About the Author

I mainly focus on Javascript/PHP/C++/.NET applications for everyday and work. I also am working on a remake of Stellar Frontier, an old 2D top down space battle game with a few fellow programmers.