Slow Internet in Ubuntu 10.10 Solved

With a fresh install of Maverick, I soon realized that my internet performance was crap.  Pages take forever to connect to and then load up quickly.  This is a DNS lookup issue.

I did two things to correct this:
(1) Disabled IPv6 in my browser (which probably wasn't necessary)
(2) Edited /etc/nsswitch.conf changing the "hosts" line order by putting 'files' and 'dns' first and leaving the rest in the order they were originally in.


CHANGED

hosts: files wins mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

TO
hosts: files dns wins mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] mdns4