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why is firefox dead slow in linux?


sallam
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Hmm... Never happens with me. My Linux browsing is the same and my download is WAY faster. I'm using my router as a DNS server though so that might explain it. ISP is Comcast, who officially offers NO tech support for Linux.

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For the sake of a quick and strictly non-empirical comparison, I loaded up Hotmail in Firefox/XP, rebooted and did the same in Firefox/Gentoo.

 

Based on bvc's distro continuum, I would expect Gentoo to be closer to the Debian (slow) end, but I noticed no perceptible difference between load-times. FWIW, I also use my router as DNS server.

 

How about pinging a server in both OSes? Would that be a valid test? It definitely sounds as if bvc's issue is a DNS one, or failing that perhaps something in the way the deb browser packages are built...

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Have you tried switching modems/routers? I had a similar problem too found one of my routers just doesn't like Linux. Some pages just won't load, others just take ages. The other one worked fine. Have you tried a different one?

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Have you tried switching modems/routers?  I had a similar problem too found one of my routers just doesn't like Linux.  Some pages just won't load, others just take ages.  The other one worked fine.  Have you tried a different one?

 

LOL well mine likes Linux better I guess :lol:

 

[belkin F5D7630uk4A if yer interested. Hope they pay me for the plug]

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I'm really curious as to what is behind this.

Please answer/respond if you're having this slow behaviour.

 

I know from experience that webbrowsing times can be slow, but in the cases I have seen it was remedied by not pointing to the gateway device as dns but put the ip addresses of the providers dns servers directly.

 

If browsing is slow, there would be a message like: resolving [www name] and the browser would just sit there.

 

In that case, ping is also slow.

 

What kind of times do you get if you ping www.google.com (also try www.google.nl .it .co.uk etc, just for kicks)?

Normally I get around 35ms or so - this is through cable (2mbit/s connection). And my browsing is lightning fast - to the point that I know I'm faster in finding something on my _own_ website by using google via the net than to go to my webdir locally...

 

If you have downloaded a webpage, and you hit reply or request another page from the same server, is it still slow?

If it is, it's not dns - that already got resolved...

 

Do you have bind installed and running?

 

Suppose you get fast ping times but slow pages from those domains, could it be browser related?

 

I'd say if you get slow ping times at first, but then fast responses, I'd say there's something wrong with the dns setup - I'm not talking about user config per se.

 

If you get fast response on some domains/servers, but slow on others, could there be issues between certain servers and the webbrowser you're using?

 

Let's not forget, several people may have symptoms of slowness, but there may be different things at hand, in one case a nasty router, in another some browser plugins, etc. Just because things look/behave the same, they aren't necessarily due to the same cause.

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Also, make sure not to use Konqueror for web browsing ever. At least for me, it's horrendously slow (something like 10 times as fast) when compared to Firefox, in both Mandrake, Debian and Knoppix.

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I had this problem a lot with 10.1 and a new Netgear router - when you click, it would spend ages looking up the site and then connecting to it. I upgraded the firmware and that helped a lot, and then I looked at the DNS servers (via the mcc, not on the router which gets them automatically from the isp) and saw that the primary server was 127.0.0.1. I removed that and things were perfect.

 

Then I ugraded to 10.2 then LE and no problems... but now, for no apparent reason, it's started doing it again. I found that 127.0.0.1 had crept back again, but removing it and doing to firefox tweaks haven't got it fully back to speed again. No idea what's happened there!

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Guest TheadiaDryan
did my own test (2005LE vs Win2000): win2000 quite a bit faster, using cable.

I just did a test myself using Verizon aDSL between my Win2K Pro machine and LE2005. The results are in. Even though this one is a 1200 Duron and the other is a 2600+ Sempron, they both load the same: lightning fast. I am using Konqueror though if that makes a difference. I can't seem to get Mozilla to install the Flash plug-in.

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looking up would be DNS... so there could be a decent chance your ISP's dns servers are overloaded or something like that.

 

A few weekends back there was a massive ddos attack on BigPond's (australia's biggest ISP) DNS servers. For their customers, it made any dns requests damn slow.

 

I have occassionally have slow dns times on my isp too. not often though.

 

iphitus

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I've had problems too (especially after a fresh install), so here's my 'recipe' for speeding things up - gathered together from this and other forums. I think the most effective is disabling ipV6, but I went about making changes all at once, so I have no real proof that the ipv6 change really was the most important.

 

Recipe for Better Networking (Faster Browser loads)

 

/etc/Modules.conf #to turn off ipv6 at OS level, was empty before

alias net-pf-10 off

 

For wireless configurations only

/etc/sysconfig/network #only had NETWORKING=Yes before

HOSTNAME=localhost

NETWORKING=yes

GATEWAY=192.168.1.1 # or the IP address of your gateway device - your default

GATEWAYDEV=wlan0

 

In Firefox - about:config

ipv6: toggle to false

I'm trying to attach a screen shot of the about:config changes I made, but not sure it will work. Basicall increased the network.http.max and .pipeline to true.

 

 

good luck. I get reasonable response now downloading pages now.

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