Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Really Slow Internet

Canonical Ltd. has released the newest update to their extremely popular Linux operating system Ubuntu: Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04 LTS), in short this is an amazing release, we are very impressed by it and will be writing more about this soon. However in our testing we have found it to have a much slower Internet connection than we were used to on the previous release Gutsy Gibbon.

This turns out what may be a problem with the Operating System, the consensus seems to be that is a problem that was experienced in Ubuntu Edgy Eft (version 6.10) and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (version 7.10), although we never seen it in 7.10. The symptoms include an abnormally slow internet connection, inability to access certain domains, slow log-on times, slow application launch times, etc. There doesn’t seem to be any official acknowledgement of the issue by Canonical, yet.

The problem seems to stem from the Ubuntu configuration. By default IPv6 is the default network interface, and if you’re on an IPv4-only network (like most of the world) Ubuntu will try (sometimes for many seconds) the IPv6 network connection before switching to the IPv4 connection.

The fix is quite easy though, just disable IPv6, here is the instructions:

In Terminal:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

You might need to enter your password here.

Gedit opens:

Look for:

ALIAS NET-PF-10 IPV6

Comment this line out so it looks like:

#ALIAS NET-PF-10 IPV6

And add a line right underneath that looks like this:

ALIAS NET-PF-10 OFF

Save the file, exit terminal, restart your system and things should be speedy again.

You can also watch this video of the whole process (note this shows 7.10, but the process is the same).

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