change mtu

[Eberhard Roloff]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 21:49:42 -0400
William Biggs <kc8pdr at gmail.com> wrote:

> ok I do not under stand on the windows box the pages load
> faster but on ubuntu box it takes about 10 to to 20s to load
> the page and also when I go to toast.net to do a speed test I
> get this 372* K and on the windows box I get this I get 2.9mg
> I on the same router the computer's are side by side .
> On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 18:24 -0700, User Iam wrote:
> > The MTU sets the size of the data in the frame..
> > 
> > Has nothing to do with download speed...
> > 
While imho this is technically correct, the mtu surely
influences your actual network speed negatively, when e.g. the
frame size is to large and in consequence, many packets are
fragmented and need to be reassembled. With german dsl, it is
known that often dsl-connections work better with a slighly
reduced mtu of say 1452.

Imho another thing you possibly could
benefit from could be deactivating ipv6. Ex. look here for an
example:
 http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-6841.html

Should you happen to use firefox, I would recommend to install
the extension "fasterfox". I also found that at least on my
computer Opera 9 (now in the Ubuntu commecial repo) seems to work
notably quicker than even fasterfox-firefox does.

Lastly if this does not help I would recommend to install
ethereal aka wireshark on both Lin and Win and see where your
Linux Box is wasting your time. Possibly there are
nameresolution issues as well asanything else. 

For comparison, my internet connection is much slower (about
200kbytes/sec maximum) and with this I cannot spot any
difference between Windows (XP on a Celeron 2600/1GB Ram) and
Linux (Dapper on a P4 2800, 2GB Ram) in regard to Internet Speed.

hth
Eberhard