Speed up internet access and browsing in Ubuntu by disabling IPV6

This post is related to “Solving Slow Firefox Web Browsing and Internet app problem“.

This problem is very noticeable in Ubuntu 9.10 (Lucid) onwards and it affects Ubuntu 10.04 (Karmic) too at a certain degree. Even my friend, piju the Ubuntu members also experienced this problem.

To remedy this, another suggested solution (from Brian Yang) is to disable IPV6 completely from Ubuntu.

To do that, you need to add the following lines to /etc/sysctl.conf file


#disable IPv6
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

Then you have to reboot, and you can check whether IPv6 has been disabled by running this command:
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6

It should display : 1

Note that this “bug” cause internet experience on Ubuntu seems to be perceived as “slower” than the windows machine as it causes delay on DNS lookup.

p/s: I know we should migrate to IPv6 by now, and Ubuntu did a good job, but for the sake of productivity and some users are complaining about the comparison between the internet surfing speed between Ubuntu and other operating system, I felt that something need to done, hence the posts.