One thing you haven't mentioned (as far as I can see) is the actual hardware specifications of the machines? ----------------------------------------------- Sent by freemail.servebeer.com Signup for your free 100mb Mail account today! Full pop3/smtp accounts available!! ----------------------------------------------- -----Original Message----- From: Chris Carlen [mailto:crobc@sbcglobal.net] Sent: 19 February 2005 03:41 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: [SLE] Linux still surfs slower than Windows Hi: I have two Suse 9.1 Linuxes and one Win2k on a LAN behind a Linksys WRT54G router connected to SBC/Yahoo DSL. The router gets a dynamic IP via DHCP, and connects via PPPoE. It also receives DNS server addresses. The LAN hosts have static IPs on subnet 192.168.1.0 and statically configured DNS server addresses set to the values shown by the router. These DNS addresses are always the same: 63.203.35.55 and 206.13.28.12 . The Windows host also has a static IP and manually configured DNS servers. Also, there is a Win2k VMware machine on each Linux box with bridged networking and static IP and DNS configurations. So a total of two Linux boxes, one real Win2k, and two virtual Win2k. The problem is simply that the Linux boxes using Mozilla or Konqueror web browsers, surf the web ridiculously slow. Typically 45 seconds to load a page like www.cnn.com, and 10-15 seconds to load simpler pages like www.google.com. The Win2k, both the real and virtual machines, all surf at instantaneous speed using either Mozilla or IE. I changed the Linux DNS server configurations to free servers: 205.166.226.38 and 69.67.108.10, which improved speed significantly. Now Linux surfs about 3-4 times slower than Windows on average for all web sites. A big improvement, but still unacceptable. Typical 6-8 second loads for www.cnn.com, vs. 2-3 seconds for Windows. I posted before "Terrible Web Surfing Speed" and will summarize the results of the suggestions and other attempts at fixing this: 1. The only suggestion which improved matters was to use in the file /etc/resolv.conf: options timeout:1 This improved the surfing speed using SBC/Yahoo DNS servers to about the same speed as using the free servers, still about 3-4 times slower than Win2k. This is the condition I am in at this time. 2. Switching to DHCP IP and DNS assignments for the LAN clients did not help. 3. Turning off IPv6 did not help. 4. Captain Dondo suggested: "Well, perhaps your router/ISP is issuing ICMP redirects and your linux box ain't set up to accept them? I don't know if Windows accepts redirects by default; it makes it easier for the user but opens up security holes.... Hmmm. Which way would Windows lean? As root, run this command: for f in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/accept_redirects; do echo 1 > $f; done Well I have all these already set to 1 so that can't be the problem:
for f in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/accept_redirects; do cat $f; done 1 1 1 1 1
5. Use the WRT54G as the DNS server. I tried this, and it works. Some performance is a little bit better than either the free servers or the options timeout:1, but still about 2 times slower than Windows. Hmm. Very close, but still disappointingly slower than Windows. It seems with the router as DNS, that initial loads of new pages are slow, but then loading again is very fast. Before, it was the same slow speed all the time. But Windows still manages twice the initial load speed for all pages. Any further suggestions how to improve things would be appreciated. Good day! -- _____________________ Christopher R. Carlen crobc@sbcglobal.net SuSE 9.1 Linux 2.6.5 -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com