network tuning and performance troubleshooting

[Josh Carroll]

> Problem: Browser status 'looking up address' for 10 seconds for any
>  web page clicked. Slashdot takes almost a minute to load. But FTP
> performance is good and running a shoutcast stream is no problem.
> Sending mail via my ISP is slow.

How about a large transfer over http with fetch or wget? Does it
perform as well as an ftp connection? It could be a DNS problem. Try a
dig of slashdot.org and see what the query time is:

dig A slashdot.org | grep 'Query time'

Run that a few times and see how fast it's resolving. It should be on
the order of a 100ms or less, at least after the first query.

Josh