Slower Firefox page loading on Ubuntu v. Windows

[Robbo]

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.

As it's saying it's "Looking up..." its waiting on resolving the ip
address of the website (or if the page has ads from other hosts).   

You can use `dig hostname` to see how fast your lookups are (don't know
of a Windows util that can tell you the same).  Remember to lookup an
host that you haven't been to for a while so it doesn't just get it from
the cache!

If lookups are slow check out your /etc/resolv.conf.  The following link
may be of help as well as they are having the same issue as yourself..

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/357257