Slower Firefox page loading on Ubuntu v. Windows

[Al Gordon]

On 9/24/05, Frank McCormick <fmccormick at videotron.ca> wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Sep 2005 16:13:14 +0100
> Robbo <ml at the-view.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2005-09-23 at 14:18 -0400, Steve Zatz wrote:
> > > I have two Windows XP machines and one Ubuntu (Hoary) machine on my
> > > home network and in side by side comparisons, the loading of pages in
> > > Firefox is 2-5x slower on Ubuntu v. the Windows' machines.  I have
> > > swapped the various network connections so it does not appear to be a
> > > problem with the physical network.  The hardware is roughly
> > > comparable.  I can commonly watch the Firefox status bar on Ubuntu
> > > report that it is "Looking up ..." while this status is usually gone
> > > in an instant on the Windows machines.  Firefox appears to be
> > > configured identically across all three machines.  I started noticing
> > > the problem about a month ago -- before that if there was a speed
> > > difference it wasn't so noticeable that I was moved to do some timings
> > > and investigate.  If anyone has any thoughts for investigating this
> > > further or potential remedies, I would be very interested.  Thanks.
> >
> > Also try these...
> >
> > Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
> > 1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down
> > and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining
> > network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
> > Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When
> > you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds
> > up page loading. 2. Alter the entries as follows: Set
> > "network.http.pipelining" to "true" Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining"
> > to "true" Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like
> > 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once. 3. Lastly right-click
> > anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay"
> > and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser
> > waits before it acts on information it receives. If you're using a
> > broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
> >
> > Copied from http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php
>
>
>
> Did all that here - no change. Firefox under XP is MUCH faster. I don't
> understand it but here at least its true. Still looking for solutions.
>
> Cheers
>
> Frank

Frank, does installing the following packages help?

nscd (name service caching daemon)
squid (www proxy cache)

You also need to configure firefox to use squid as your cache - Edit,
Preferences, General, Connection Settings, Manual Proxy Configuration,
http proxy: localhost, port 3128.

--

  -- AL --