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Firefox 33 network activity is suddenly extremely slow on Ubuntu 14.04

Randy Syring
Randy Syring

Background: I'm a software developer running Firefox 33 on Ubuntu 14.04. I've tried all the usual things to fix this problem including:

- safe mode - creating a new and fresh profile - disabling http proxy in settings - restarted firefox and the computer - can use Chrome without problems, ruling out general networking/internet speed issues

Problem: I use Firefox as my default browser constantly. It was working just fine yesterday for most of the day. However, when I came home in the evening and fired up the computer, browsing the internet with Firefox was agonizing. I'm talking like 10-20 seconds to load pages that are loading almost instantly on Chrome on the same computer.

I do note that sometimes a page will load almost instantly as it should, but then subsequent assets on that page and further page loads will go back to taking a long time.

Background: I'm a software developer running Firefox 33 on Ubuntu 14.04. I've tried all the usual things to fix this problem including: - safe mode - creating a new and fresh profile - disabling http proxy in settings - restarted firefox and the computer - can use Chrome without problems, ruling out general networking/internet speed issues Problem: I use Firefox as my default browser constantly. It was working just fine yesterday for most of the day. However, when I came home in the evening and fired up the computer, browsing the internet with Firefox was agonizing. I'm talking like 10-20 seconds to load pages that are loading almost instantly on Chrome on the same computer. I do note that sometimes a page will load almost instantly as it should, but then subsequent assets on that page and further page loads will go back to taking a long time.

Chosen solution

I realized that the problem was DNS settings on my system. For some reason, my resolve.conf settings didn't switch when I joined my home network and contained two nameserver entries that didn't exist on this network. The third nameserver in resolve.conf worked. As soon as I removed the first two and left just the good nameserver, this problem went away.

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Randy Syring
Randy Syring Question owner

Chosen Solution

I realized that the problem was DNS settings on my system. For some reason, my resolve.conf settings didn't switch when I joined my home network and contained two nameserver entries that didn't exist on this network. The third nameserver in resolve.conf worked. As soon as I removed the first two and left just the good nameserver, this problem went away.