Proper Cache settings
At Rally we are focused on delivering the data to your browser at the time you need it, and caching static files on your local machine. This allows us to minimize the number of network calls and render your data more quickly.  It is imperative for caching to be enabled within your web browser for this to be effective.

For Firefox 2 & 3:
1) Within Firefox, Enter "about:config"  into the URL (no http:// required)
2) Filter on browser.cache
3) Ensure that browser.cache.memory.enable and browser.cache.disk.enable are set to their default settings (true).

For Internet Explorer:
1) Within IE, Navigate in this sequence Tools -> Internet Options -> General
2) In the "Browsing history" box press the Settings button.

3) On the "Temporary Internet Files" header
4) Under the "Check for newer versions of stored pages:" section, make sure that "Automatically" is selected.

Ensuring Compression with Firefox
1) Within Firefox, Enter about:config into the URL
2) Filter on accept-encoding
3) Ensure that network.http.accept-encoding is equal to the default value (gzip,deflate). You can right click on the item, and select Reset to return to the default value.

Ensuring Compression with Internet Explorer
If your company uses a proxy server for web connections - you should enable “HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections” setting in the advanced tab of Internet Explorer. This will enable HTTP/1.1 protocol with a proxy server. When this option is not checked, your webrowser will not be able to take advantage of the  compression features that offer IE significantly accelerated loading times. (Firefox users, your browser automatically uses HTTP/1.1 in all cases by default.)

Step-by-step:
1. In Internet Explorer On the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. In the Settings box, locate the HTTP 1.1 settings section.
4. If the "Use HTTP1.1 through proxy connections" check box is unchecked, check it. (See attached screenshot)

Note: Companies using Microsoft Windows in a domain environment have the option of setting up a group policy to automatically enable this setting in Internet Explorer for each user that log into your local domain. Please also take into consideration that there is a bug in Windows XP SP2 which causes IE to override this setting and continue to use HTTP 1.0, even when the "Use HTTP1.1 through proxy connections" check-box is shown to be selected. More information can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=904710