With WebShield enabled, it takes at least 5s to load my blog: http://calmacs.org/blog/bogdan/. I looked at the traffic with Firebug and most of those 5s are spent after loading the HTML and before getting the images (which made me suspect Avast).
After I disabled WebShield, the page loads instantly.
I would expect that you should be able to reproduce the same behavior from outside. For now, I’ll leave the WebShield disabled, 5s for a page on the LAN is too much.
I’d been having problems too with Firefox suddenly becoming quite slow in loading (and even more so doing DNS lookups) a few sub-versions back. By trial and error I found that by using a manual HTTP proxy setting in Firefox to correspond with avast’s “transparent proxy” (127.0.0.1, port 12080), rather than auto-detect or direct-connect, made quite an improvement.
What was trickier was that I continued to get even worse delays connecting to HTTPS sites, which obviously (?) couldn’t have involved avast’s proxy. No problems with IE, on the rare occasions I used it, just Firefox. I was asking around all over the place and I forget where I finally got the suggestion that worked, but it was to change my local area connection’s DNS servers from auto to 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3 (primary and secondary, respectively), and that cleared things up just great.
I’m on a single-computer DSL connection, and of course the specific DNS settings might depend on your particular system and network card. But no one ever asked me for those particulars, so try those same settings and see if they help you.
I’m not seeing any slowdown with Firefox 3.6. I’ve not set a proxy in Firefox and Avast WebShield works just fine. I allow DNS to be resolved thru my ISP DNS servers(RoadRunner). Maybe I’m just lucky, but it appears most aren’t having this problem, although there have been several posts on here about that.
One issue could be using something like Nightly Tool Tester or other such extensions that force ‘compatibility’ with an updated version of Firefox when the forced extension can’t possibly work correctly in the new environment.
Just tried loading your page now. Loaded in about 1 second (maybe 2 at the most). Running avast! Free (5.0.148) and Firefox 3.6. Is it possible that perhaps one of your extensions is causing the problem. You might try loading Firefox in safe mode (all extensions disabled) to see if that makes any difference.
Like Gandalf1369, the page loads very quickly. Try loading your own page using Firefox Safe Mode. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode and see if load time improves.
bcalmac, posted at the same time you had. :
There has to be something else in the mix becides Firefox 3.6 and Avast or we would be seeing the same problem with the site as you. What other security software are you running?
Bogdan if you look around the forum you will see others in similar situation as you. Very hard to pick a cause to your problem straight off the bat but likely to be something minor in how your system config that is slowing the link down.
Your page loads quickly on my 32bit with only 1GB ram and average 1 megabit speed broadband.
The link speed doesn’t matter here. The server hosting the blog sits right next to me. Even when I access it using the LAN address, it still takes 5s. And after I disable WebShield on my desktop it becomes instant.
Yes avast’s web shield also scan IE port 80 HTTP traffic, as it does other common browsers.
So on the LAN firefox is still very slow and IE is almost instant, which is strange since both browsers should be exposed to the same web shield filtering.
The strange thing here is that in the avast settings, Troubleshooting, Redirect Settings, click the inverted triangle to expand the details and you will notice the Ignore local communications option is checked. So in theory there wouldn’t be any filtering for a LAN (not certain though), but I think that the flow would still go through the web shield local host proxy.
That’s me for the night, almost 4a.m. here, hopefully someone can pick up on this.
