Do more cores in a CPU = faster tabbed browsing? (particularly in Chrome and Firefox)
I'm planning to do a few upgrades on my computer soon, and the thing I do the most is tabbed browsing -- I'll open 30 bookmarked tabs at the same time, or I'll click on a bunch of links (50+) and flip through them on tabs. My current 5 year old computer is on a Pentium D with 2 gb ram and tabs load pretty slow at times.
I had my mind set on a newer dual-core to fix things, but would 3 or 4 cores make tabbed browsing noticeably faster and smoother? Or is it the ram, or both? Or is it actually a problem with the browser itself and can't be improved with hardware?
Thanks in advance!
Browsing in itself isn't very CPU intensive.
The speed of opening 30tabs at once will depend a lot on your browser, the websites themselves, and your internet connection. Before I even explain why, if you are opening bookmarks, pages you open a lot, more than likely they will be in your cache, which depending on your browser, might be located in a folder on your HDD/SSD or some browsers store cache in the RAM (I think opera does this). In this case, the speed of your HDD/SSD and/or RAM will be a big factor in how fast the page opens. However, if you are loading pages that aren't in the cache, or if perhaps you don't use a cache, then the browser itself is a big player. Browsers like firefox and opera have the ability to customize the max connections, and the max connections per server. The more simultaneous connections your browser is able to have, theoretically, the faster your webpage downloads (but it also depends on the server itself, it if allows this many connections). So when you open 50tabs at once, increasing your max connections from lets say 32, to 96 or 128 (settings in opera for example), it will likely make them faster. The max connections per server however is a bit more specific, this controls the amount of connections to just one single server, not all of them. The reason this setting is important is you want to have lots of connections per sever, but you don't want to make them way too high, because one server can hog all connections and starve the others off of it.
^At least that's my understanding of how it works.
Secondly, a lot of this depends on the website, local websites from servers, such as your local news station, will likely have a server near you which will in many cases result in a faster opening webpage. Some websites also require lots of hops through hubs.
If you open up CMD and type in "tracert-d www.google.com" for example, it will show you how many hubs you must go through before you reach the website, each hub is increased latency and if just one hub has too much traffic, it can cause a slow down.
And lastly, your internet connection is a big role, both the down/up as well as the quality of the connection will help. Make sure you have a fast DNS server for quick name resolving. Each website is an IP address, to prevent you from having to enter an IP for each website, they are represented as names like google, which a DNS server must then resolve into an IP, the faster it does it, the quicker browsing might be.
If something is wrong, please correct me, this is just from what I've read about so not sure if its all correct.