I have a very fast cable internet connection. It tops out at around 3mbs. However web pages seem to load very slowly. I've tested the broweser on my system (Mozilla, Firefox. Konquer, and Epiphany). For some reason Firefox and Mozilla run the slowest. It takes Firefox about a minute and a half to load ebay.com, It takes mozilla about a minute, and it take Konquer and Epiphany 7-20 seconds. Does anybody have else have this problem? My system is also fast. I have a AMD 2700 cpu, A nvidia g force 4 mx, 512mb of ram, and one gb swap partition. My networking card is also highly supported by Linux. It's a netgear fa11. When I first downloaded Firefox version 0.9 it loaded web sites fast. However over time it seems that it loads them slower. Another odd thing is that most internet conection speed sites say they my conection runs at about 3mbs, However www.numion.com/YourSpeed/ which uses images to test for speed say my conection is only 202kbs. I can't figure out exactly what's going wrong. I don't have any processes running in the background that efect my internet conection other than iptables. Is it possible that only the application itself is running slow? Another thing is that I run firefox out of my home directory (~/firefox). I have alot of download software and digital photos under my home directory as well. Could this effect profromance?

Hmmm.....

Do you have the right ethernet card configured?

What does /etc/resolv.conf say?

Try using ping to check your latency. Also, if it's a cable connection, it could be that other people in your neighborhood are maxing their bandwidth, or uncapping, or something, which would affect your speed. If cable is becoming more popular in your area, it would also explain the gradual drop in speed.

I decided to see if my conection was the same a normal. So for the first time in several months I booted windows xp. When I went to ebay.com it loaded extreamly fast. The same goes for amazon. Whatever the problem is it's Linux side!
flamesrock, my network card is configured just fine. If it was configured wrong then I would have internet access at all, right?

Well, now, that IS odd. Go ahead and paste the contents of /etc/resolv.conf here, since a messed up DNS configuration might be causing your problems. Also, looking back at what you said earlier about the speed test, it looks like the 3mbps is 3 megabits/second, and 202kb/s is probably 202 kilobytes/second, which translates to a little over 1.6 megabits/sec. (But that's just a guess.)

; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search attbi.com
nameserver 63.240.76.4
nameserver 204.127.198.4

nothing seems that odd to me. FYI I use comcast.

And for some reason the name used for my netgear card is wrong. I'll switch over to m y other card and see if I get any results.

I had a similar problem..and I can't exactly remember how I solved it....except that I originally had 3 nameservers in resolv.conf...deleted two and messed with a few other things. The problem eventually went away.

I notice that when I try to load amazon.com I pauses at the process when it tries to resolve images.amazon.net. My guess is that the dns servers I'm using are slow. I don't know why, buy maybe the proper dns servers aren't being used by my comp. I'll try two things: looking around my isp's site, and if worse comes to worse booting up windows and checking my settings.

nope!!! I might try using "other" dns servers.