Websites slow to load in Firefox

Russputin · 12-13-2015, 12:11 PM

Ive been running linux Mint 17.3 on a Dell 5010
(triple booted with Win7 and Ubuntu W )
And was hoping web browsing would be faster than using bloated Windows, it is a bit faster but many pages take a long time to load , i was wondering where the bottleneck could be and how i can improve load times. I usually stick with FF or Chrome browser
BTW im total noob but trying to become "command line lterate" so please keep it simple

NGIB · 12-13-2015, 01:02 PM

Your internet service?

ondoho · 12-13-2015, 01:19 PM

it can have dozens of reasons, some of which are:

psychological effect that makes you over-sensitive for changes since installing linux, in other words the internet works just as well as under windows, you just feel that it doesn't
wireless drivers can, very rarely, require additional setup or be inferior to their windows equivalents
your browser is set up differently (basically not caching sites) - very unlikely if you are using vanilla firefox
your ISP has decided that you are a 2nd class customer now that you are using linux
websites can also do that, usually easily circumvented by changing your user agent (addons available)

salasi · 12-13-2015, 02:06 PM

Usually DNS.

Now, what you do about this depends on how seriously you want to take to take it, but your choices include just doing benchmarking on various upstream providers (and selecting a faster one), or locally running a DNS cache (or both).

This can be a nice little project, involving learning a bit more about how networking really works, so do get back and say how you want to move forward.

ondoho · 12-13-2015, 03:06 PM

^ right, i forgot about that.
fwiw, i've been using opennic for a long while now and i appreciate to have one less point of data mining on my system.

erik2282 · 12-13-2015, 09:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ondoho

^ right, i forgot about that.
fwiw, i've been using opennic for a long while now and i appreciate to have one less point of data mining on my system.

Just switched my dns to opennic. Didn't know about it, Thanks for sharing,

salasi · 12-14-2015, 04:38 PM

OK, a bit more info (which may be a bit over the top):

DNS is the 'human readable name to ip address' lookup service; you absolutely need it, but not everything is as fast as everything else.
Some versions of Windows (not sure about the latest) break the rules in order to make DNS work faster; this probably does improve 'the user experience'...until stuff goes wrong
This isn't the only way of making things go faster; by default (ie, if you haven't changed things), you are probably using your ISP's DNS servers (either you have their addresses set up on your computer, or your router does);'El Cheapo' ISPs save money on their DNS servers by having inadequate resources for the traffic they encounter, and quite often they only marginally meet the description of 'working'. For the default set up in linux, if your first DNS server isn't reasonably fast/reliable, performance will suck (and nothing you can do with adding fast servers later in the list will help).
There are programs that help with 'benchmarking' DNS servers; namebench is one, DNSBench is another. Now, DNSBench is a windows program, but it does run under Wine (and I prefer the info that you get to namebench, but that's a matter of taste).
Another problem, which was once popular, but seems less common nowadays, is running both IPV4 and IPV6; well this shouldn't necessarily be a problem, but it does make it more difficult to get everything set up so there are no unreasonable delays.
Out on the wild internet, the most common DNS swerver for serious usage is BIND; for home usage (as a DNS cache) this is just overkill. More difficult than it needs to be to set up for a 'first-timer' unless you feel that adding BIND to your CV is a particularly helpful thing.
For home usage, something like DNSMasq (alternatives, Maradns, powerDNS) would be all that you need, and relatively easy to set up - ok, there are lots of config options, but in most circumstances, you leave most at the defaults.