Connection problem

[Tommo]

Hi guys.

I have two computers connected to a router; one uses XP, the other (which I am using) runs Debian. The problem is the browser on my debian machine is running very slow. I am using Firefox. I have tried epiphany to see if it was a browser issue but I get the same speeds. The thing is, the other computer running XP is operating normally.

Any ideas how I could diagnose the problem?

Please note, I have tried another network cable and the problem remains.

[matsp]

What does "top" say when you are running FireFox? Is the CPU load high or low? Is there a lot of memory used, or lots free?

Also, what is slow - the drawing pages, downloading files or something else?

If you use wget to download a file, what speed does that happen at?

--
Mats

[Tommo]

It's actually pretty low. It wasn't displaying in top initially, I had to refresh a page for 'firefox-bin' to appear and that was using maybe 8% max cpu and staying at 5.4% memory. ps aux shows:

tommo@debian:~$ ps aux | grep firefox
tommo     3260  0.0  0.1   4164  1524 ?        S    19:27   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox
tommo     3263  0.0  0.1   4200  1560 ?        S    19:27   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/firefox/run-mozilla.sh /usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox-bin
tommo     3268  1.3  5.4 152896 55868 ?        Sl   19:27   0:44 /usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox-bin
tommo    20891  0.0  0.0   2852   720 pts/1    S+   20:24   0:00 grep firefox

And yes it is slow at drawing pages, downloading files is not a problem.

[matsp]

Have you got the right graphics drivers for your hardware?

Does "xgears" run fast?

--
Mats

[Tommo]

xgears is not installed. It is just a recent problem I have had. I got rid of Iceweasel and installed firefox manually not that long ago. As for my graphics drivers, I doubt it's the problem, although I could be wrong I wouldn't know.

$/sbin/lspci

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82915G/GV/910GL Express Chipset Family Graphics Controller (rev 04)

I don't see anything specifically related to the above in lsmod, but then again it could be compiled into the kernel. But I digress.

[jmd15]

Have you installed any add-ons for Firefox? There are known add-ons that could slow it down a lot, or cause it to crash and freeze etc.
And I have to ask, why did you remove Iceweasel? I love it!

[dwks]

Iceweasel is very nice. Besides, it's basically exactly the same as Firefox. They just renamed it because there are some copyright problems with the name Firefox or the Firefox logo or something, I forget the exact details.

And yes it is slow at drawing pages, downloading files is not a problem.

Well then it probably is a browser issue, even if Epiphany was slow too. (Did you try Epiphany when Firefox was fast?)

I'm pretty sure that Firefox can switch browsing engines, at least under Windows. Or maybe that was Opera. Anyway, you could try switching back to the default rendering engine if you changed it. You could try modifying/deleting your configuration files in case one of the options has slowed it down.

What about other browsers? Do you have KDE installed? Because I could see Epiphany and Firefox using the same engine, but I think Konqueror uses KHTML, which is completely different.

[Tommo]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I got rid of Iceweasel as it was crashing a lot if i remember correctly. I don't have KDE no, I prefer Gnome. What is a browsing engine? I have never heard of that before. How would I check this? I don't understand why it started all of a sudden though, this is why I think there may even be something wrong with my eth card. Strange.

[Tommo]

I tried my windows partition, and browsing wasn't a problem. So I got rid of firefox, and installed iceweasel again. The problem remains. I may just re-install, this is getting on my tits.

Edit: After a couple of minutes, it has started working normally again. Who knows.

[dwks]

Many Linux systems automatically index files. This takes a lot of CPU while it's running. Perhaps that was what was happening.

If you add a system resource monitor or whatever to Gnome's taskbar, you can easily see when this is happening, because the majority of the CPU is used reading the filesystem, which shows up as a different, darker colour in the resource monitor's CPU monitor.

You can stop the indexing if you really want to. It's usually a find process being run by nobody. I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are -- I always just let it run. It doesn't take long.