Guide:Speed up FarmVille

Speed up Farmville
The golden rule is that for improving performance one usually has to sacrifice something else, usually design.

In this guide some tweaks are shown which might improve your Farmville experience by some large extend, if you suffer from performance issues. If you don't have any problems with performance then you should not consider these tweaks.

Obvious tweaks
In the upper left corner of the game screen there are three buttons: Especially the graphics quality reduction has some impact on your browser's performance with farmville. If you don't care about perfect graphics: turn it off.
 * Toggle graphics quality
 * Sound on/off
 * Music on/off

Browser selection
Maybe switching to some other browser than your current one might speed things up.

E.g. you could try Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, ...

None of these can be declared "the best", so you have to choose by yourself. But you should try playing Farmville with at least one other browser if you experience performance issues.

Firefox and AdBlock Plus
If you do use Firefox then there is quite a tricky thing that can allow you to really improve performance greatly.

It is the Addon "AdBlock Plus". This Addon not only can help you in blocking 99% of annoying advertisement in the web, it can be abused to block flashy and performance-reducing Farmville elements.

First Step: Installation
Find Adblock Plus with your favourite Search Engine (e.g. Google, Bing, ...) and add it to your Firefox. You will be asked to restart Firefox.

After restart you will be asked to choose a filter abonnement. Just accept the default one or skip that part (each of these abonnements contains thousands of advertisement addresses; with high probability whenever you visit any website with external advertisement, the ad will be blocked completely; you should give it a try).

You should see a small red stop sign with the letters "ABP" in the upper right corner of your browser. Use it to show blockable elements, turn Adblock on/off, edit your settings, add self-defined filters...

That's it.

Second Step: Customization of your Farmville
Browse to Farmville. Click on the ABP-button to toggle vision of all elements that are on the current website in the bottom of your browser window. You will realize that there are LOTS of elements. If you play Farmville via Facebook and did choose some filter abonnement, then you will, with high probability, already see some difference: No more Facebook-Ads on the right. These blocked elements can be found in this list in the bottom - elements in red are blocked elements.

The general idea is to block Farmville elements that you don't care to see on your farm. To do this you have to define filters by yourself.

Example:

You do have a tractor, a harvester, a seeder and a seeding plane, but you never click on them, you know exactly where they are and you don't care how they look like. So why even load them?

Click on the dropdown-button on the right of "ABP" and choose settings. Click "Add filter" and insert

farmville.com/*/assets/equipment/

This filter will block all elements from farmville.com (that is "www.farmville.com", "static.farmville.com", ... anything to which the mask xyz.farmville.com applies, with xyz holding any symbols.) that do have the part "/assets/equipment/" in them. The "*" is a wild card, it stands for any number of any symbols: It could be nothing (i.e. farmville.com//assets/equipment) or any concatenation of symbols (e.g. farmville.com/prod/hashed/assets/equipment/, farmville.com/ad637b2c19928d/assets/equipment). This filter will also block all elements that BEGIN with this address, so "static.farmville.com/prod/hashed/assets/equipment/seeder.swf" willb e blocked as well. Think of it as if a "*" is added at the end of each filter.

After adding a filter, you won't see results immediately, you have to reload the flash element first, e.g. by using "F5" (reloads the whole website). In case of our example you won't see any vehicles anymore. Instead you will see shadowy circles indicating the size of the blocked objects. You can still click on them, move them, use them, but you don't see them anymore.

Finding out, which address belongs to which element can be quite difficult. Sometimes you can guess from the name, sometimes you have to do it by trial and error

To have a big impact on your performance you should try to block elements with motion, e.g. animals.

Typically blocked elements

 * vehicles: farmville.com/*/assets/equipment/
 * animals: farmville.com/*/assets/animals/
 * avatar: farmville.com/assets/mylife/avatar_assets/
 * buildings: farmville.com/*/assets/buildings/
 * trees: farmville.com/*/assets/trees/

Hash values
By mid of July, Farmville changed a lot of addresses. Before that, the address "farmville.com/*/assets/animals/calf_pink_full.swf" allowed an easy guess of what's behind this address. But now for some reason addresses are not that easy to interpret anymore.

If you know some specific 1:1 relationships, please share your knowledge: