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Speeding up Firefox under Ubuntu

Mohammad Al-Shami — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:16:08 +0000

Ever wonder why browsing under Ubuntu is slower than Windows even on the same network? Well, it has to do with Ubuntu enabling IPv6 by default. This means Ubuntu will try IPv4 only after IPv6 times out. Also, Firefox comes built with Pango by default which makes it slower than it should be. I’ve fixed that on Karmic Koala, other versions should be similar. Here’s how to do it:

Disable IPv6 globally:

sudo vi /etc/default/grub

then find

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and replace it with

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”ipv6.disable=1 quiet splash”

Then update grub from the command line

sudo update-grub

Tell Firefox not to load Pango:

vi ~/.bashrc

and add

MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1

at the end

Tweak Firefox’s about:config settings:

network.http.pipelining -> True
- network.http.pipelining.maxrequests -> 8 or 10
- network.http.proxy.pipelining -> True
- network.dns.disableIPv6 -> True

Enjoy

Slow Browsing Under Ubuntu

Mohammad Al-Shami — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:35:23 +0000

EDIT: This post only covers IPv6, please check the update post which covers IPv6 and Firefox

Today when I rebooted to my Windows installation which I very rarely do, I noticed that browsing under Windows feels much faster than under Ubuntu. After booting back to Ubuntu I noticed the “looking up domain.tld” part was taking a lot of time, which seemed a little odd.

Anyways, after some googling I found out that Debian enables IPv6 by default and uses that before and uses it before IPv4. A quick remedy was:

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/bad_list

#Add this line
alias net-pf-10 off

After which you should reboot your system. Now browsing feels much faster. To speed it up a little I installed a local caching DNS server which works like a charm. A quick HOWTO can be found here

Hope this helps.

Disabling RSS Feeds in Drupal 5.x

Mohammad Al-Shami — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:58:28 +0000

You might want to create a site that doesn’t have RSS. I did this for my employer to create the admission exam system. Having the RSS icons show up just annoyed me, here is how to do it:

In theme.inc, just comment all the code lines in this function:

function theme_feed_icon($url) {
//  if ($image = theme('image', 'misc/feed.png', t('Syndicate content'), t('Syndicate content'))) {
//    return '<a href="'. check_url($url) .'" class="feed-icon">'. $image. '</a>';
//}
}

In common.inc do the same with this function except for the first and last lines:

function drupal_add_feed($url = NULL, $title = '') {
  static $stored_feed_links = array();

/*  if (!is_null($url)) {
    $stored_feed_links[$url] = theme('feed_icon', $url);

    drupal_add_link(array('rel' => 'alternate',
                          'type' => 'application/rss+xml',
                          'title' => $title,
                          'href' => $url));
  }*/
  return $stored_feed_links;
}