Internet very slow when upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 [closed]

"What hardware are you running this on?

I found FireFox 3.x often paused noticeably (though not for as much as ten seconds) on visiting new sites on my netbook (with its slow SSD) due to updating the sqlite file that feeds the bad site checking process. This was introduced in FF3, so may not have been present in your Ubuntu 8.x installation.

To see if disk I/O is the bottle-neck you are seeing, run top in a console window and see what the %wait reading is during these pauses. Also, you ca try iotop to confirm that any big group of I/O operations you see is indeed directly due to FireFox.

On my netbook, which has more RAM than it needs for day-to-day operation, I got around this issue by moving my FireFox profile to a RAM drive (and syncing it back to the copy on the SSD occasionally, when I've made changes like updating bookmarks or addins). I'm still using FF3.x, not the 3.5.x that comes with Ubuntu 9.10, so I can't say for sure if this behaviour would be the same on the newer version."