Hi,

I run a Mandriva 2006 on my laptop. The system is after all very fast. Just while surfing the net I noticed that it's very slow. Opera, Firefox and Konqueror have troubles in opening pages. My wlan card is dwl-650+ from dlink. Other software using the net work fine and this card had no problem on previous installations (mandrake 10.1 and Suse 9.3). I've also no firewall. Other clients running windows taking connection from the same router are working fine.

How is this possible?

Thanks

Best to have one... You should enable shorewall and see if problem persists
Check for rootkits etc. (rkhunter, chkrootkit)

Are you using ndiswrapper? Maybe a version incompatibility

start 2 terminals as root

run top in one, and tail -f /var/log/syslog
Start firefox or whatever browser
See if you find any clue

how about your ram and swap.
Browser take a large amount of memory for the cache when they are opening a page. Morover, you often have more than ones page open. If you don't have enough ram, it will take up sway and if you don't have enogh swap, it will hang

Thanks,

this is my top output:

top - 15:06:14 up 1:47, 1 user, load average: 2.12, 1.15, 0.74
Tasks: 93 total, 3 running, 90 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 47.0% us, 44.1% sy, 3.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 5.9% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 353264k total, 269496k used, 83768k free, 8012k buffers
Swap: 1124508k total, 2572k used, 1121936k free, 115264k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6214 root 25 0 2016 1056 820 R 75.9 0.3 1:27.33 top
3469 root 15 0 112m 21m 4244 S 13.3 6.2 6:54.65 X
6224 fabio 15 0 29056 14m 11m S 5.0 4.3 0:01.53 konsole
6085 fabio 35 19 8996 5416 3420 R 3.6 1.5 0:01.81 operapluginwrap
6040 fabio 15 0 281m 46m 14m S 1.3 13.5 0:32.16 opera
3446 root 16 0 2812 668 572 S 0.3 0.2 0:01.43 nifd
4131 fabio 15 0 26616 18m 7620 S 0.3 5.3 0:06.53 mdkapplet
6266 fabio 16 0 2012 1048 820 R 0.3 0.3 0:00.08 top
1 root 16 0 1580 528 464 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.90 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 events/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
5 root 18 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
7 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
86 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 kblockd/0
116 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
117 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush

I'm not that expert to determine if something is going wrong... Do you find any clue inside it?

Thanks if you will be so kind to reply.

Fabio

>>Cpu(s): 47.0% us,
This is possibly high

>>Mem: 353 264k total, 269496k used, 83768k free, 8012k buffers
Not bad

>>Swap: 1 124 508k total, 2572k used, 1121936k free, 115264k cached
Good

>>PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
>>6214 root 25 0 2016 1056 820 R 75.9 0.3 1:27.33 top
75.9% rather high for top

What cpu and ram have you got just double checking

do you think possibly that none of the above mentioned suggestions are correct and its as simple as proxy settings and the like? Ive had problems like that before... some distros work great on the 'net while others make the computer crawl while browsing... and it always boiled down to setting up ip addresses in the proper order and BAM! everything smoothed out almost immediately. Just a thought.

Dear all,
thanks for your kind replies. I live in two houses, one in Italy and one in Switzerland. Now, strange things happen:

- in Switzerland internet is very slow, but I can surf the net with Konqueror, Opera and Firefox. The router has no firewall and also my Linbox has no firewall. I use a static IP and the othe PC's running XP are faster while surfing the net;

- in Italy, same conditions: no firewall at all. Internet is fast, but Opera and Firefox do not work. They hang and show a white page.

In both of cases I use a wireless card from D-Link perfectly configured and working.

Now, what is the reason of such different behaviours? Just routers are different...I'm sure there is the catch...but I'm really not expert about routers...any clue? Maybe they are not well configured?

Fabio

I wish I was too :-) , but maybe commuting is bad there?

Time for a bit of paranoia! You really need one, and
you could run chkrootkit and all the rest. Hope your lappy is not
compromised. Best practice would be to reinstall and setup a firewall.
Anyway your choice

it would be good to check that you have wep enabled (an nobody is sniffing)
and that you have the same connection rate with the router
in each place.

Hmmm not sure where to go from here

Uhm, sometimes two houses are not better than one, expecially if you have to take a train every month and pass 12 hours just travelling and doing nothing. Anyway, Rome and Basel are very beautiful cities

Ok, I promise it! I will install a firewall, because everyone says so.


Yes, wep is enabled!

I think a problem could be the channel. While in Italy I know that the communication between router and linbox happens through channel 6, in Switzerland I use channel 1, but just because I don't know the real channel I have to use (options should be 1, 6 or 11). Can this make the connection slower?

I will try and let you know...

thanks anyway!

Do not believe so

I said that, but it is difficult to do.
I do not think kwifimanager or iwconfig give reliable info on that
(because of the way ndiswrapper works)
It is very basic but you could ping your router to see if there
are any differences

Anyway I have no other idea at the minute