Firefox slow on localhost connections on Vista?
- Published February 21st, 2008 in Tips & Tricks, Firefox
I’ve been working on a project for a client consisting of a website running on a couple of laptops (about 10). This project has been developed in Ruby on Rails and everything went fine until the final deployment on the laptop machines running Vista. On these machines (cheap HP G7000 by the way) it was really slooow. And I mean it.
I did some benchmarking and I was getting around 10 reqs/sec on a high load web page without any kind of caching. 10 reqs/sec is more than enough for a single user web application. It couldn’t be it. Also, it was working blazingly fast on my laptop.
I never questioned Firefox. I’ve never had speed issues with Firefox in the past. But anyway, I popped up Internet Explorer and I was incredule to see that the site was flying in IE7.
A quick Google search led me to this. For some particular reason I’m yet to assert, Firefox gets stuck if IPv6 for DNS querying is activated on Windows Vista.
A simple
network.dns.disableIPv6 false
under about:config will fix it.
I disabled it and the problem is gone. I’m wondering who’s fault is it.. considering that under the same settings Firefox runs perfectly fine in Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux I’m very suspicious about Windows Vista. I loath it.
P.S. - Not to add that Vista’s unzip utility is seriously broken. It was extracting a 50MB zip file (InstantRails, by the way) at a rate of 5Kb/sec. Downloading the open source 7-Zip, installing and then extracting the file was faster than waiting for Vista’s unzip to finish its job.
The difference lies in the fact that Vista is the first MS OS that brings an IPv6 stack enabled by default (even if it doesn’t go anywhere :) ). And this is nothing bad! I actually think it’s great someone starts pushing IPv6 into commercial OS’s (Leopard does the same-thing by the way, but not making it the default route)
Diogo,
Actually most Linux distros and Mac OS X tries using IPv6 if available and I’ve never noticed such a big slow down on any of those operating systems.
You can fix this without reconfiguring firefox by editing your hostfile.
Look in your hostfile at the value for localhost, and comment out the ipv6 address, leaving only the ipv4. With no changes to firefox this got my localhost performance back to normal.