So, something interesting I've noticed on my AMD A4 workstation... Frequency scaling on, using the ondemand governor -> GMail is slow. (As are other large webapps.) Frequency scaling off, using the performance governor -> GMail is about as fast as any other website. Frequency scaling seems to really kill browser performance. If you've got a recent laptop or workstation running Linux, and browsing is sluggish on it, you might want to see what your CPU clock speed is doing,