slow web browsing

Hi,

I am using Fedora 4 with quite a few rounds of yum updates. For the
past few months, I have had a problem that the browser response would
become slow after running the system for a few days. The solution had
been to turn off wireless router and the DSL modem and then turn off
the power supply. In other words, turning off everything and wait about
20 seconds then restart.

I am using yahoo sbc DSL and a D-Link wireless router. I thought there
might be some problems with these two devices which required a reset
from time to time.

However, recently I bought a PC with windows XP installed. Now I have
two machines connected to the same D-Link router. Surprisingly, while
the Fedora web browsing is slow, the XP browsing isn't.

For example, while I try to load www.yahoo.com, I saw "Resolving host
www.yahoo.com..." at the Netscape status bar. It would take about 5
seconds before the page appears.

Once DNS resolved the name, downloading seems to be fast enough.

Can someone please shed some light on this?

Thanks,
Minghui

On 29 Jul 2006 19:16:30 -0700, (E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> However, recently I bought a PC with windows XP installed. Now I have
> two machines connected to the same D-Link router. Surprisingly, while
> the Fedora web browsing is slow, the XP browsing isn't.
>
> For example, while I try to load www.yahoo.com, I saw "Resolving host
> www.yahoo.com..." at the Netscape status bar. It would take about 5
> seconds before the page appears.
>
> Once DNS resolved the name, downloading seems to be fast enough.

Possible slowdowns:
1 your are running a caching dns server
2 you are running the tmdns service
3 Your system is doing ipv6 to ipv4 conversions
4 firefox needs ipv6 disabled

I have only disabled ipv6 usage (3) on my Mandriva Linux and surfing is
just fine. I have not researched how to do it on other distributions.

For (4)
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
disable ipv6 firefox in the first box
*linux* in the Group box Note that is astrisk linux astrisk

Results 1 - 10 of 100 for your query (0.14 seconds)

Thanks for the enlightening answer. I am very interested. Today my
machine seems fine and I didn't do anything trying to resolve the issue
yesterday.

In fact, I also tried wget yesterday and it was also slow. So the
problem did not seem to be related to a particular browser.

I do not think that I have tmdns service on my Fedora machine, as
indicated below:
$ rpm -q tmdns
package tmdns is not installed
$ ls /var/service/tmdns
ls: /var/service/tmdns: No such file or directory

I am not sure whether my Fedora is running a caching DNS server while
my XP machine isn't. I need to get more info on that.

I am not sure whether my Fedora 4 is using IPV6 or not. Does the
following indicate it is IPV6? (Note the inet6 addr).

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:63:C4:13:85
inet addr:192.168.0.114 Bcast:192.168.0.255
Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::240:63ff:fec4:1385/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:12520 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:9786 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:16691697 (15.9 MiB) TX bytes:766530 (748.5 KiB)
Interrupt:5 Base address:0xc000

In what case my system needs to do IPV6 to IPV4 conversion?

Thanks,
Minghui

Bit Twister wrote:
> On 29 Jul 2006 19:16:30 -0700, (E-Mail Removed) wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > However, recently I bought a PC with windows XP installed. Now I have
> > two machines connected to the same D-Link router. Surprisingly, while
> > the Fedora web browsing is slow, the XP browsing isn't.
> >
> > For example, while I try to load www.yahoo.com, I saw "Resolving host
> > www.yahoo.com..." at the Netscape status bar. It would take about 5
> > seconds before the page appears.
> >
> > Once DNS resolved the name, downloading seems to be fast enough.
>
> Possible slowdowns:
> 1 your are running a caching dns server
> 2 you are running the tmdns service
> 3 Your system is doing ipv6 to ipv4 conversions
> 4 firefox needs ipv6 disabled
>
> I have only disabled ipv6 usage (3) on my Mandriva Linux and surfing is
> just fine. I have not researched how to do it on other distributions.
>
> For (4)
> http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
> disable ipv6 firefox in the first box
> *linux* in the Group box Note that is astrisk linux astrisk
>
> Results 1 - 10 of 100 for your query (0.14 seconds)

(E-Mail Removed) wrote:

> For example, while I try to load www.yahoo.com, I saw "Resolving host
> www.yahoo.com..." at the Netscape status bar. It would take about 5
> seconds before the page appears.
>
> Once DNS resolved the name, downloading seems to be fast enough.
>

You can check host resolving at the command line with
host yahoo.com <IP address of DNS server>

Just "host yahoo.com" will be resolved with DNS entries in
/etc/resolv.conf.

Compare with an Internet DNS server. Some open ones are 4.2.2.1,
4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3.

I've had some problems with firefox not resolving until I manually
resovle something from the command line with the "host" command.

If the host command resolves OK but you still have problems, try
comparing the response of firefox with lynx as in "lynx yahoo.com".