Hi All, I have made some observations that I thought that I would share. I have heard lots of complaints about Mozilla being slow and a lot of praises about Opera being fast. A little while back I noticed the same thing on my system. Loading up something like /. or CNN's homepage took something on the order of a couple of seconds to load with Opera while it took something on the order of 10 seconds or more to do the same thing on the same computer over the same cable modem with Mozilla. It seemed that whenever I looked at the status bar on Mozilla it always said something like looking up this host or that host as it loaded up one piece of the page at a time.
In more recent times these problems went away. Through a series of hardware failures I had to reconstruct my firewall. When I reconstructed the firewall I used a combination of Mandrake's wizards along with some custom tweaks to get the box back online quickly. While I was doing this I allowed the Mandrake tools to configure a local caching DNS server and set up DHCP to point to the local caching DNS server and instead of going directly to my ISP's DNS servers. Now all of a sudden Mozilla seems to go almost as fast as Opera and on some things faster on my mdk 8.2 box. Also on my test box I recently installed mdk 9.0. (Pain in the rear from the messed up official ISO images that refuse to eject the CDs and the non ISO mirrors that are missing packages.) On that box Mozilla has a faster feel to it because when I type in a URL it is usually just bam there in a fraction of a second while with Opera I can see the individual parts of the page load. So the inferences that I make from this data is that with a cable modem at least, DNS lookups are often times the main bottleneck on page load times. It also seems that Mozilla is not as efficient at doing DNS lookups as Opera is or at least Opera is doing more DNS caching than Mozilla is. --Jason Snyder--
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