Firstly, I am NOT any system/networking administrator, nor I even
intend to become one.

Three times till date the internet in our company has slowed down -
to the level that on my Linux machine I simply cannot get to the
login page of Gmail, but when I try to access Gmail from any of the
Windows machine in our company - there isn't any speed problem.

Now, when I complained to the IT people here, they told me that
internet runs faster on Windows as compared to Linux so they it is
not their fault!!

What information should I present here for you to help/enlighten
them/me?

Did you check the same from any other linux machine? Have you been facing it for a long time or just for hours/days?

I have Linux installed on a VM on Windows 7 host, but my personal internet runs much better in Linux compare to host Windows 7.

So this could be a problem with your PC only. Once check gmail and internet speed using any other Linux machine.

BTW, You can use tool like "http://www.speedtest.net/" to check internet speed on both OS, but make sure that it's allowed in your company.

What kind of problem?
Currently there isn't any other Linux machine around me to access.

What error message, if any, do you get?

Is your system configured to fetch an IP address via DHCP, or it it configured manually?

Are you using the same DNS server as the Windows PCs?

Are either your system or the Windows PCs accessing the Internet through a proxy server?

Is IPv6 enabled on your Linux system?

The claim that "the Internet works slower" on Linux systems is, as you've probably guessed, nonsense. If all Linux systems are slower than the Windows systems in the same network, there must be configuration or network issues somewhere.

2 members found this post helpful.

That's silly -- it sounds to me like your IT people are just trying to avoid having to do work to figure out what is wrong.

That being said, your Ethernet card could be dodgy or its driver could be buggy. Do you see lots of packet errors if you do "ifconfig"? What model NIC are you using and what is your interface speed? Can you ping both an internal computer and e.g. www.google.com to see if the problem is local to your network or beyond it?

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Problem could be with your browser or system itself. I guess you're using mozila web browser. So for basic troubleshooting, clear histroy, cookies, form data etc. from it (use Tools > 'Clear recent history' option > Choose 'everything' option > OK) and restart the browser, and check the speed again.

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In addition to what shivaa said, I would also check how the browser caches pages. Login page could be cached on a win system and not so on a linux system.

OK

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If connected to the same network with both wireless and cable we have found that sone distros try to bridge the connections.At the same time we had trouble with our wireless making linuxmachienes browsing very slowly.

I wanted to highlight that suggestion so it isn't lost in the noise of the other suggestions.

Obviously I can't be sure, but based on the described symptoms I think the chances are greater that the cause is a slow DNS server than all other possibilities combined.

On a windows system, use the command
ipconfig /all

On your Linux system, some of the corresponding info is available from the command
/sbin/ifconfig -a
other info from
cat /etc/resolv.conf

Try comparing the Windows info to the Linux info and see if any differences appear significant.

I just tried that on a Windows and Linux system at work, just with the intent of making sure I was giving you the right commands. The two DNS servers listed for Windows here are completely disjoint from the three listed for Linux. I will ask our IT about that on Monday. I don't think the difference was intentional. Another possibility is the info in my /etc/resolv.conf is obsolete and the Linux system actually gets its DNS info elsewhere. Some of that is pretty strange on the network here. Maybe some actual expert should comment on whether my suggestion that you look in /etc/resolv.conf is a good suggestion.

Edit, another command to try:
host -v gmail.com
Look at the bottom line where it tells you which DNS server gave the answer and how fast.

Edit: I really need to ask my IT guy about this on Monday. I tried a few of those (replacing gmail.com with various popular sites) half the time adding the server override for one of the two DNS servers my Windows system uses
host -v gmail.com 10.52.0.128
(That number is local and won't have the same meaning for you).
Each of the two servers my desktop Windows system uses is consistently ten or more times slower than the one the shared Linux system uses (170 to 270 ms vs 15 to 21 ms). Repeating the same request didn't make it faster, so it was already cached at the closest level at which it might be cached.

3 members found this post helpful.

"it sounds to me like your IT people are just trying to avoid having to do work to figure out what is wrong."

Surely not?!

Is it just the internet that's slow, or the entire network interface that's slow? In other words, when the internet is behaving poorly on the Linux system, is the rest of the local network doing the same or can you still access machines on your local network quickly? If the entire network is slowing down, I would look at your NIC, drivers, etc. If it's just the internet that's slowing down, I would look at your DNS configuration. Also, is it ALL sites that slow down, or just certain ones? If it's just certain ones it could be a bad TCP setting (window scaling, etc) on your system that's causing conflicts with that particular server.

I've noticed time and time again that, in general, Linux is noticeably faster than Windows for local network access, while internet access is a wash (the bottleneck is the connection to the ISP, not the OS or the NIC itself).

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Just fyi here for trying this host -v command, thank you btw i like this tool, my response times to both google.com and gmail.com are in the same range as you have (136 google, 150 gmail) yet when i run that command to my personal web server located out of town the response was a mear 46.

This might not be the best test for the response time for google or gmail for that matter, but a very powerful tool it is.

you might want to look into running mtr to google.com to see what you can find as well. could be a bad router in your LAN, or something outside of your LAN that would be out of the control of your IT.

Odds still are highest on a bad DNS or NIC setting/driver/hardware. On the same hardware win7/Fedora 18 beta (heck Fedora 14-18) my Fedora side is almost always faster unless i am visiting a site that has bad code and only works well with IE. I try to avoid those sites.

Also remember - every windows system beloging to an AD server uses the AD server for name services (and that can add up to a lot of name servers). The Linux system may only use a few fixed servers - and those may get overloaded if they are internal.

You might consider testing some external name servers (try the google ones - use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

Now this doesn't work if you have to connect to private names (as in internal web servers).

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If the company has a proxy or uses things like proxy pac files or uses active directory to authenticate proxy then you could be limited by linux. My company limits all un-authenticated systems even older ones like NT to very slow speeds.

For most people, there is no difference between windows and linux. The rules of tcp/ip do not change between the OS's.

You can use opendns to see if a new dns server may help. It would easier to try a few host file edits to see if that fixes it. In fact, most people could speed up their system with the 20 or so most common web pages they visit in some cases.

One issue that I'm aware of is with Firefox in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 10.04 plus its Firefox works normal, Ubuntu 12.04 plus its Firefox is slow.

I found a solution somewhere on the web and if I recall correctly it's the proxy setting in Firefox; if you're behind a proxy, configure it manually instead of using automatic detection. I did not apply this myself as I switched back to 10.04 on that system before the solution was found.

This might apply to your browser as well; worth a try.

PS
I'm aware that you're not using Ubuntu (by the looks of the logo)

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