Ubuntu slower loading web pages than Mac

Question

I'm not sure what's going on, but my new Linux box is moving a lot slower than my MacBook on the same network. I've tried the following.

1. Loading web pages in Firefox is about 10x slower
2. dig is pretty fast (~20-150 msec on first run, then around 1 msec after that)
3. time curl google.com | real = 0m0.116s
4. ping google.com takes about 10.5 ms

I'm not sure what it could be, because I also compared those numbers with what I'm getting on the MacBook and it's about the same. I'm not sure what other metric I can look at to get a feel for what's going on. I think it might be related to the DNS lookup, not sure.

Answer 1

I've had similar issues related to DNS lookups. What are you using as your DNS server? Are you using your router's caching DNS? Why not try overriding your DNS settings to something speedy like Google's, just to rule it out?

Primary   8.8.8.8
Secondary 8.8.4.4

Answer 2

Try disabling IPv6 for Firefox, if your network equipment cannot handle it, it can make browsing (DNS lookups) noticeably slower. Disabling can be done by:

1. Open the URL about:config
2. Search for network.dns.disableIPv6
3. If it's not set to true, double-click it to set it to true.
4. IPv6 DNS lookups are now disabled in Firefox.