I recently decided to dual boot Fedora 4 to check it out and consider switching from Windows. Everything is running fine, but my internet is annoyingly slow compared to the internet in Windows XP. When I open a page in firefox or konqueror it takes forever to look up the page, and then it eventually loads it.
I'm running Comcast high speed internet, which is usually pretty fast. I run it through a router with DHCP...and linux is able to get its IP fine. I would try to configure the router, but I don't know how to access it from linux. In windows, I had to input the router's IP as the default gateway before I could access it. In linux, i don't know how to do that.

When I ping google, it takes around 15 seconds to start pining. I don't get any packet loss and the time is around 20ms. Even if I ping a nonexistant site (say ping x)...it takes 15 seconds to return anything.

Any help would be appreciated, and would encourage me to stick with linux instead of deserting it.

A couple of things I would look for.
Run top from a shell (konsole) and see if something is running taking up all of your processor bandwidth.
Open a konsole and enter
If something is running taking all of the processor then kill it with the PID, example
Are you running Fedora on an old machine? Fedora is slow on a PII type.
ping should start almost immediately.

I have a similar problem. Some websites load incredibly slow while others load at the speed that they should. I don't have this problem with any of my Windows systems. I've notived that search engines, most coporate websites, downloads, and some other websites load fine. However, many other sites take around 30 seconds to minutes to load. Most of the time when submitting information to create an account will never load to the next page, same thing goes for web based e-mail, and forum (using Windows right now).

I have a basic DSL connection using a LAN cable through a D-Link router to a 2WIRE modem. Fedora is the only OS on the computer and the problem is the same in Firefox and Konqueror. I have used the top command and that doesn't seem to be my problem, and I have a Pentium III.

And I also have a similar problem. I have a pentium IV, 256K processor, 128 Meg ram with several harddrives that I can swap in and out. One drive has Redhat 7.2 loaded on it with all updates. It uses Netscape and accesses all websites without a problem. Two other drives have Fedora core 3 and core 4 loaded on them repectively. The Core 4 drive has all of the updates installed. Both of them use Firefox. Besides Fedora being much more sluggish than Redhat 7.2, I am usually, but not always, able to access websites such as www.redhat.com and www.linux.org but other websites, such as www.google.com, are never retrieved. I have a DSL connection.

There are all kinds of distros for different needs I guess. I would recommend FreeBSD or Slackware for a fast machine. What you are describing seems to be normal for a modern Fedora distro. You can help that by installing more RAM into the box. 128MB is not enough for a heavy DE. Firefox is a good browser but a little sluggish, Try Dillo. Evolution is a great email client but a little sluggish, try sylpheed. KDE is a great DE but a little bloated, try fluxbox with Idesk. You did not ask about changing distros but i've had the same sluggish, stalling out problems with Fedora, Mandrake, Vector etc. I solved it by switching to FreeBSD. It has excellent network performance, rock stable, all the apps you want, a great ports system, and I'm typing on it right now on a PII 350 192MB RAM 6GB UDMA 33 HD with no problems. Some swear by Slackware. Some by Debian. I would rather use this PII with BSD on it than a P4 with XP on it.
The newest Linux distros comes with all the bells and whistles enabled. Look at top and see what's running. You may want to turn off a lot of what you don't use. You can do a kernel recompile to speed things up. You can use Fluxbox or similar. If you've installed a distro for the first time then you have just begun. There is so much that can be done with an open source OS to make it run the way you like it. Here is some reading for you. Stick with it. It'll take 6 months. It is worth it.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/index.html
http://www.slackbook.org/
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-l...en/table.shtml

Hi,
were u able to figure out the reason of the slow internet access?
I've tried few things, like disable the firewall, but i was unsuccessful...
thanks
ken

Hello everybody,

All of you can count me too in the "slow internet aggrieved" group.

I had FC 1 working perfectly fine. Then I upgraded FC3. That was a bad day for me. My internet speed went slow like anything. Tried all the things - like disabling ipv6 in the browser etc - but of no avail. Wasted some sapce on this only forum also.
However there was some difference - When I used to access the internet through a proxy, I was getting good speed.
After trying everything and wasting around a month, I finallly gave up.
Then I graduated back to my plain old FC 1.
Since then I don't have any problem.

But now I am apprehensive of new distributions.

Prabhat Soni

This looks more like a DNS lookup problem rather than anything with the bloatiness of the distro. I think FC4 enables a local caching name server and the nscd (name service caching daemon). These should not be a problem unless you are very low on memory. The local caching name server can cause problems with firewalls that have limits in number of udp sessions. Take a look in /etc/resolv.conf to which name servers local or remote that is used.

Have you tried pinging direct to the IP address instead of names to diagnose if DNS lookups are the problem.

As I recall, I looked at /etc/resolv.conf on both my Redhat 7.2 and Fedora Core 4 installations and they were identical, but with Redhat 7.2, using Netscape, there are no problems, while there are serious problems with Fedora C4 and C3 using Firefox. I also am still confused why some urls are accessed and not others: I retrieve www.redhat.com okay but not www.google.com???

My Firefox was extremely slow in FC4. I turned off the IPv6 name resolution and it instantly sped it up.

Im having the same problem in Mandriva LE, it will sit there for 20-30 seconds then load up quickly. How do you go about turning off the IPv6 name resolution, i havnt tried that

Rob

I have an AMD 200mhz processor, 750meg memory and until firefox 1.07, was very satisfied with performance. With 1.07, somehow performance slipped. I also started to get macromedia errors (is it MM or other) with the message that cant open a player for an *.swf file. Then the firefox application locks up. Since I dont download anything that is not maintenance (I use yumex), I cannot understand how to resolve the problem.

I did resolve it by putting aside firefox 1.07 for fedora core 4 and switched to Galeon 1.3.21. This version of the web browser is great. It is fast, does what I expect, and does not lock up.

For those who posted the problems about FF and slowness, do what I did, and try this program. It would be nice to know if it vindicates FF or if it points to FF as the problem.

Leslie
(In Montreal, Quebec)

I would agree that every version of FF after 1.0.4 has had problems. 1.0.7 does seem to work better than 1.0.5, 1.0.6 though. You might give Mozilla a try, It loads slower first instance but seems to be quite stable.

Also give little Dillo a look. It doesn't render frames correctly without a patch but it is a super fast little browser.

I, too, have a similar problem. I have tried Suse 9.2, Ubuntu, Blag, Foresight, and now Suse 10.0 with the same results. It is not a DNS resolution problem, and I've tried all the Firefox fixes posted here. In fact, the problem is there no matter which browser I use, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera 8.5 ... there are some web sites, especially ANY Yahoo! site, that will not load. I don't remember this problem back a couple years ago when I tried Mandrake 8.1. (Then my hard drive went south and I was away from linux for awhile.)

One common theme I've noticed throughout the threads that report this 'slow internet' is that everyone experiencing this is using a 2.6 kernel.

prabhatsoni went from FC1 (a 2.4 kernel) to FC3 (2.6).
oremguy compared a RedHat 7.2 (2.4) with FC4 (2.6).

What differences are there in the way the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels handle tcp/ip and the internet?

since ive posted the disabling of IPv6 in firefox has fixed everything for me. But given that you are having problems across the board im not sure what it could be, Im a total newb so I couldnt even begin to speculate.
Rob