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Problems running Gmail and LinkedIn on Ubuntu

18/06/2009

For some unknown reason Gmail and LinkedIn don’t work on Ubuntu. Here’s what happens:

  1. Go to Gmail (http://www.google.com/mail) or LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/);
  2. Login with your userid and password;
  3. Wait for the next page to load.

It doesn’t matter whether I’m using Firefox or Opera; same result. I’ve now found a workaround that resolves the problem:

$ sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1360

You’ll need to execute this after each reboot or alternatively add the instruction to System > Preferences > Startup Applications.

Note. If necessary replace eth0 with active network interface, e.g. wlan0.

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6 Comments
  1. I log in to Gmail every day using Firefox in an Ubuntu box and it works just fine. Sounds to me like your issue is with your network, rather than a particular site.

  2. I stand corrected! What a strange bug. Hope they find a permanent fix soon.

  3. You can find more information on http://www.petsprofile.com/2009/06/fixing-linux-slow-internet-linkedin-and.html and lanchpad. It is issue with the latest ubuntu releases. System is expected to get the MTU from the DHCP server for best performance but hardwares are not good at providing info. Ubuntu community may come up with better network manager tool to update mtu setting.

  4. If set MTU to 1200 or 1000 does not work than you shoud try:

    sudo su -
    echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_window_scaling
    exit

    If this work and you do not want to set every time then configure it on
    /etc/sysctl.conf adding:
    net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1

    • Not sure how this will help since windows scaling is enabled by default in the Linux kernel. Did you mean to disable, i.e.:

      net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling=0

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