Linux Mint Forums

For several days now, Firefox has been taking AGES to open any site (even google.com took up to a minute to load, now it's about 20 seconds).

I am dual booting Windows 7 with Mint 10 KDE on a new laptop. The Mint installation is two weeks old, I have NO problems with browsing on Windows. The Internet connection was only a tiny bit slower than in Win7 at the beginning, then I started downloading a bunch of big files through KTorrent and noticed two things: KTorrent downloaded only about 300 KB/s (normal for Windows with my connection is 1 - 1,5 MB) and Internet browsing became unbearable, most sites wouldn't load at all, the rest was extremely slow to load.

I started googling frantically (on Windows...) three days ago and found out that a lot of people have this issue, going as far back as Mint 7. I've followed the instrucions from here (Firefox settings, IPv6 etc - it helped a bit, but Chrome is still unimaginably slow), used the DNS servers (this helped a lot, KTorrent started downloading at about 1MB/s and previously visited pages started to load faster, but still far from a comfortable speed), tried to follow what Lvcoyote suggested at the bottom of this page:

Just as a follow up to provide a solution that worked for me.

Code: Select all

sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Look for this line:

Code: Select all

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4

1. Remove the text in bold
2. Change the order of wins dns to dns wins
The line should read hosts: files dns wins when finished.

only to get: I tried to find the nsswitch file manually, but it doesn't seem to exist (at least not in the /etc folder).
These were the solutions that appeared all over the Internet. There were some more, but, for example, applied to Gnome and I could not find the equivalents in KDE.

This is extremely frustrating and if I don't fix this, I might have to give up on Mint, it's too big an issue, even though I have beed using the distro on and off for over a year now and grown to be very fond of it
The fact that I've been using Linux for some time now does not mean that I'm not still a total n00b though, so I beg you to be as clear as you can with any instructions

Please please, help.

Well,

(1) gedit is the default Gnome editor so I'm not surprised that you can't find it in KDE.

(2) sudo should never be used with a GUI application like an editor - it should be "gksu gedit ...." . It's been too long since I've used KDE but I think the corresponding command in KDE would be: (3) As for not finding nsswitch at all I can't help you with.

It might be a moot point though since by default that line in nsswitch does not contain "wins". So if the point was to force the order so that dns preceded wins then ........... And if you remove mdns4 then you knocked out avahi which may or not be an issue with your setup.

OK thank you for clearing that up for me:)
Abandoning the nsswitch solution, is there anything else that I might do?

I have noticed that when KTorrent is not running, the browser works much much better. The problem is, with the same workload with torrent on Win7, there is no problem with browsing.
Is there for example something that I could do to set a sort of priority of site loading higher that torrent download, but without having to turn off KTorrent anytime I want to, well, do anything? I don't even know if that kind of meddling is possible.

you can check your internet speed here at http://www.ip-details.comip-details.com and you can increase your internet speed , my friend suggest me to go this site and it is working very good.

I am also having very slow browsing in Mint 12 using Firefox and Chromium. I cleared cookies, cache and browsing history from firefox. I did a fresh install of Chromium.

Browsing is equally slow using IP address. Dig time is on the order of 60 ms.

And get this: I have a Windows 7 virtualbox guest bridged to host. Browsing is blazingly fast in IE and Firefox in the virtual machine.

charliehmint
The last post on this thread is 19 months old
Please start a new thread with your question

First you say search before posting, then you say start a new thread. Nothing is ever good for you people.