Re: [privoxy-users] Should I see a massive slowdown when chaining squid => privoxy

[Fabian K. <fk...@fa...>]

Harry Putnam <re...@ne...> wrote:

> Fabian Keil <fk...@fa...> writes:
> 
> 
> [...]
> 
> Harry wrote:
> >> Trying to more clearly define what I hope to get out of using them:
> >> 
> >> 1) I guess my main objective is taking out lots of the bunkum you see
> >> when browsing, flipping flopping adds on pages about something that
> >> the add is not really related to.  Pages with way too many things
> >> going on at one time being cut down do a manageable amount to take
> >> in.  But not cutting out things I want to see.
> >
> 
> Fabian replied:
> > That seems reasonable.
> >
> >> 2) I figured doing 1 above would almost certainly slow my browsing
> >> down some... I hoped to kind of cancel that out with the alleged speed
> >> up available by caching with squid.
> >
> > It's a common assumption that using Privoxy has to slow
> > things down, so there a FAQ for that:
> > http://www.privoxy.org/faq/misc.html#AEN729
> 
> You say further along the the default config should be a good minimum
> config.  That is what I'm using... the default.
> 
> With that config I find the FAQs summary of the item you cited to be
> rather far from my experience.  I find a considerable slowdown in much
> of my browsing.  The small end is where no slowdown is noticeable.  In
> other words over half my browsing shows a marked slowdown. 

This could be the result of a system misconfiguration (or a bug).

As mentioned before, looking at the logs should help with
what's going on. Posting the log messages for a single request
(or the whole session) with the debug flags described at:
http://www.privoxy.org/user-manual/contact.html#CONTACT-BUGS
should help.

> Fabian wrote
> > Using Firefox and Privoxy with no additional proxy, http://www.ford-trucks.com/
> > seems to load in about five seconds here (11:35:29.605 - 11:35:34.858).
> >
> > After waiting about 12 seconds, Firefox seems to request the favicon
> > again, even though it was properly received the first time and properly
> > rendered already, therefore I ignored that last request.
> >
> > With my configuration, Firefox makes 20 requests of which Privoxy
> > lets 18 through (the second favicon request is included here,
> > even though I didn't count it previously):
> 
> [...] Skipped lots of welcome details that I can compare to.
> 
> Can you post your configuration... maybe just the basic
> /etc/privoxy/config? 

I'm using various custom taggers and filters, so my configuration
should be a bit slower than the defaults, not faster.

The only lines in my config that could be considered
"performance tuning" are:

socket-timeout         200
keep-alive-timeout     300
max-client-connections 500
default-server-timeout 15
buffer-limit           2048

But they are only relevant in certain situations and for
the 20 requests caused by the http://www.ford-trucks.com/
visit they shouldn't have made a difference.

> I haven't figured out how to do what ever you did to get such a nifty
> report and haven't spent much time working at it yet.  I've been quite
> busy.  

Privoxy-Log-Parser is part of the source tarball and nowadays
some packages install it as well. It's also available at:
http://ijbswa.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ijbswa/current/tools/privoxy-log-parser.pl?view=log

It requires a verbose log to generate the statistics.
I'm mostly using:

debug     1 # Log the destination for each request Privoxy let through. See also debug 1024.
debug     2 # show each connection status
debug     4 # show I/O status
debug     8 # show header parsing
debug    32 # debug force feature
debug    64 # debug regular expression filters
debug   128 # debug redirects
debug   256 # debug GIF de-animation
debug   512 # Common Log Format
debug  1024 # Log the destination for requests Privoxy didn't let through, and the reason why.
debug  4096 # Startup banner and warnings.
debug  8192 # Non-fatal errors

Fabian