Netscape 4.x

[Richard Hall <hall@ns.utk.edu>]

Is anyone else having trouble with Netscape 4.0 or 4.5 running really
slowly?

I'm running a 2.0.36 kernel and an out-of-the-box hamm system
(ie. everything installed from .deb files in their proper place) on an
Ethernet connection.  ftp's are fast as blazes, but Netscape crawls.  My
home machine running Netscape 3.0 over a modem is at least as usable.
What's strange is that it seems like establishing a connection is the
problem.  Once a file starts to load, it gets here quick, it just takes a
long time to start.  This makes some things, like Yahoo java games,
essentially unusable, as they require frequent transfers of small amounts
of data.  For a while, I figured that it was the server, but my opponents
were experiencing no delays at all while I would wait for minutes to get
data from the server.

I tried downgrading to 3.04, but the problem still persists, perhaps not
as bad.  Does Netscape just suck?  Does the Netscape JVM suck?  Are their
any system tools I can use to try to diagnose the problem?  Is there any
chance that it is an OS issue and not a Netscape problem?

Thanks,


Richard Hall
Network Services
University of Tennessee