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I've recently converted to Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) and installed Google Chrome (not chromium). To my surprise it works very slow. The firefox included in the ditro is much faster (2-4 times as fast, sometimes more) - consistently.

Strangely enough, a chrome running in a Windows 7 VM (virtual box, NAT bridging) is working much faster as well - just as fast as I was used to before going the linux way.

Why? How can I fix the linux chrome?

Details: Ubuntu 11.04, up-to-date. Linux chrome: 13.0.782.218. Windows chrome: 13.0.782.218 m. No proxy.

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Out of curiosity, does chromium run just as slow? – frabjous Sep 2 '11 at 11:58
I faced a similar issue with chromium, not sure if it applies to your situation but it might be worth checking. I discovered that the local DNS server I was using on my router was giving me truncated DNS responses for some lookups and chromium was having trouble with that. nslookup would give me something like ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.. I changed the DNS server and chromium has been much better since. – arunkumar Sep 2 '11 at 12:36
But firefox and windows chrome are working ok... – Ran Biron Sep 2 '11 at 14:58
Chrome has a View Background Pages option, which contains the bandwidth and CPU used by each individual process. (There's also stats for nerds, which just adds on more memory information). Anything using a lot of CPU/memory in there? – new123456 Sep 2 '11 at 21:34
@new123456 - nothing of interest there. I would've been surprised as the machine I'm using a a real beast. Besides - FF and Windows chrome (configured exactly the same) are working great at the same time - so it's something to do with linux chrome, not with a general load on the system. – Ran Biron Sep 2 '11 at 23:07
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Found the issue! Apparently it was DNS resolving - but chrome didn't report it as so. Specifically, mdns services. To fix, edit /etc/nsswitch.conf (sudo of course). Replace this line

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

with this (drop mdns4_minimal and mdns4):

hosts: files dns

then restart networking by running:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Another thing (not related to the question but I found while searching) you can add is "wins" to enable windows domain resolving.

Strange that FF wasn't affected by the same thing. Does it have its own DNS resolving?

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note that by disabling mdns you won't be able to perform "near network" discovery of devices (printers and such). I consider this a small price to pay for proper browsing - but maybe a different mix of options (such as using mdns after dns) would work just as well without disabling that service. – Ran Biron Sep 2 '11 at 23:37
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