[Clug-tech] Firefox performance issues when a firewall is enabled

[John Jardine]

You're not pushing your connection through a proxy are you?  I've had FF
slow down when using a (very) remote proxy, but that's to be expected.
How the fw rules would impact that is beyond me though.

When I'm on the road I use a SSH tunnel to proxy my web connections.  It
soothes my sense of paranoia :)


On Tue, 2008-12-02 at 16:20 -0700, Gustin Johnson wrote:
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> Here is a weird one.  When I have a firewall enabled on my laptop,
> firefox becomes painfully slow (this is when I set the default INPUT
> policy to DROP).  When I create a default rule to REJECT all traffic,
> performance picks up but is noticeably laggy (eg. there is a few seconds
> of delay after I right click a link).  When I completely disable the
> firewall Firefox is very fast and responsive.
> 
> The hardware is pretty beefy and should not be a problem as it is a 2.5
> Ghz dual core Intel Core2, 3 Gigs of RAM, speedy (for a laptop) 7200 RPM
> hard drive.
> 
> I have disabled every single extension with *no* effect.
> 
> Memory and CPU utilization appear normal during these periods of
> unresponsiveness as well.
> 
> Other web browsers are not effected (konqueror and midori are two I use
> regularly as firefox alternatives).
> 
> I have also duplicated the problem on two different laptops.
> 
> But wait, theres more.  I installed Firefox for Windows, running it in
> Wine, and there are no perceptible problems.
> 
> Also, this is the 32 bit version of Firefox (downloaded from
> mozilla.com) running on a 32 bit install of K/Ubuntu 8.04.
> 
> Any ideas?
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