It feels too slow to me. No way is this considered normal performance for 4Gb of RAM. The raspberry pi 3 has less and was advertised as being ok for casual web browsing. This thing took about 7 minutes to load a hooktube video in 144p. my internet connection is fine on my other laptop.

Could it be to do with my specific wireless card? it's a broadcom BCM4311 and I'm using the b43 drivers for it.

I get that the modern web is bloated. I recall someone mentioning The New York Times's website is larger than the original DOOM from 93 in terms of Mb but it has to be something more, right?

RAM is irrelevant. Only bandwidth matters. nytimes.com is fast for me, and not-large, as I read only an article at a time. What does a bandwidth-measuring site, such as speakeasy, report?

You could get a better reply if you state the rest of the relevant hardware that could directly affect performance.

Good advice above.

To answer your specific question: Yes, Broadcom wifi can be problematic in Linux. Some users report better results with the proprietary Broadcom driver than with the open-source b43.

I am not personally a Slackware user, but I found this advice for you, might be worth a read: https://www.slackwiki.com/Broadcom_Wireless

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You might want to check https://www.speedtest.net/. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good for checking the actual speed of your connection.

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Or someone could use speedtest-cli.

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14...speedtest-cli/

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I've tried speakeasy.net and speedtest.net, I can't establish a connection strong enough to even take the test. And I didn't mean to imply the nytimes was necessarily slow for me (though is probably would be given the fact I can't even do a speed test) just using an anecdote I heard to exemplify how bloated the modern web is compared to how it used to be as I thought it might be a possibility that the average modern website has so much content that my old laptop might not be able to keep up.

I'll just try using the crappy connection I do have to download and install the proprietary drivers. I tried to do it manually before but perhaps it'll actually work this time.

if this happens using the tor network it might be a normal behaviour: surfing using tor might be frustrating, but slow speeds are pretty common with that.

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Head to a starbucks or library and see if it does it there? Those wifi networks can be notoriously slow, however. I think my partner was getting a pi, so will have to file this in the back of my mind and see if it does it on ours, too.

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nah, I tried firefox and seamonkey as well as tor. Oddly enough i think tor seems to be the fastest of the 3, though it would be biased as I disabled javascript in it so the only sites it would load in the first place would have one less language to them.

How fast is lynx?

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Could it be because you are running the Tor daemon in the background?

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ld-4175656922/

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I don't think so. Iirc, I didn't get as far as actually installing tor instead of the browser bundle. To make sure I just checked /var/logs/packages and searched for anything with "tor" in it and the only thing it returned was the browser bundle so I don't think it's that