Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.4 LTS & Firefox

Since the debacle of upgrading my Ubuntu installation I have had some real problems visiting several sites on the interwebnettubes that use Ajax. It got so frustrating at times that I literally wanted to throw my computer around the room as there appeared to be no rhyme nor reason behind it. Eventually, today I decided to say 'screw you I'm going home' and installed Konqueror. one of the features is to import my bookmarks which I duly did ... or thought I had. To get my most recent bookmarks I had to reload Firefox and export the HTML... an easy task.

To my surprise, the installation of Konqueror had 'fixed' the sluggish performance I had previously been experiencing and FF is flying (relatively speaking of course). Any suggestions/explanations why? I assume this is to do with an additional lib being added or similar...

UPDATE:

The real issue with poor performance in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx and Firefox (and it would appear Konqueror too) is to do with swap files. To prove this I ran "sudo swapoff -a" and all my buffering issues vanished i.e., I am using memory instead of swap space.

UPDATE 2:

Well, the fix above worked for a while but gradually I noted the performance decline again. Now? Well changing about:config seems to have sorted this issue out. Memory usage of Firefox has declined significantly and overall performance has improved. Here is what you do:

Open Firefox and type about:config in the URL address bar. Hit enter. A long list of configuration options will appear after you receive the warning about not messing too much with about:config. To find each of the entries simply type into the filter box the first part of each of the lines below. e.g., "network.htt" will filter to the first two so these can be changed. Simply change the filter by backspacing and typing "network.dns" to get the last one.

To change 'False' into 'True', simply select the line to change and double click. For the 3rd option just right click and select Modify

- network.http.pipelining > Make it True

- network.http.proxy.pipelining > Make it True

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests > Set to 8 or 10 (depends on your system which is better)

- network.dns.disableIPv6 > Make it True