How to speed-up the internet in Linux Mint

Few days after the installation of Linux Mint, I realized that the internet is not up to the mark in terms of speed. It is giving reasonable speed in WinXp. I am using BSNL NIC Card (CDMA 1x, which offers 144 k bps speed). A simple question irritating me…. ‘why net is slow in Mint? ‘ I stated to investigate in google and other technology blogs. Finally I found 2 reasons for this problem.

The Problem (Opportunity :-))

A] IPv6 is enabled in browser (Firefox) level and system level
Internet currently uses the IPv4.The gennext (Internet 2) are to use IPv6 (higher). IPv6 will solve many problems endemic to IPv4 (number of IP address, security, quality of service, etc.). Most of the current operating systems (Windows Vista, Linux …) are already perfectly capable of working in IPv6. IPv6 is “better” than IPv4, as both are available, then logical step to take is to firstly use IPv6. And that’s what most software does: They will first try to use IPv6 (if present in the operating system), then back to IPv4 if their application fails to use IPv6. (This additional process will sucks the time). This need to be disable in System level as well as Browser level

B] Firefox security Issue.
The second reason, is that the Firefox employs a technique to identify phishing sites. Firefox contacts Google.com for every http request and then it saves the results into ‘urlclassifier3.sqlite’ in your profile. If file grows more than 50MB, it leads to heavy drive thrashing and slow operation. (I am using Firefox 3)

Now the Solution Part

I] To disable the ‘IPv6’ in Firefox, try out the following steps

1. Open Firefox,
2. Type in the address bar: ‘about: config’
3. In the filter, type: ipv6. Find the variable network.dns.disableIPv6
4 Change value to true to disable IPv6 support in Firefox.

II] To disable the ‘IPv6’ in System level (Linux Mint), try out the following steps

1. Edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist using any of the text editor (I used Emacs)
sudo emacs -nw /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
2. Add at the end of file the line:
blacklist ipv6

III] To solve the thrashing problem I tried out the following steps

1. Open Firefox and go to ‘Preferences’ which could be in Tools menu or Edit Menu.
2. Open the ‘Security’ tab, you will find the 2 check box captioned in
a] “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected Attack site”
b] “Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected forgery”
3. Turn off these two check boxes
4. Delete the following ‘sqlite’ frile from your profle using rm command.
rm .mozilla/firefox/*/urlclassifier3.sqlite
5. Restart the Firefox.

Now I cannot compare the net speed in WinXP and Mint. Both working fine for me