I have been dealing with an issue recently whereby if I want to browse to a website, say google.com, I get excruciatingly slow connection times. Once I do manage to connect to the site there is no issue whatsoever, and internet speeds are fast. Following a link, I again get very slow connections. I get the same behavior with ping google.com: exceedingly long times between pings but very fast responses.

This indicated to me there was something wrong with the resolution of domains, and indeed if I tried to ping an IP address directly, say the router at ping 192.168.0.1 I got very fast pings. Researching the topic, it seems there could be many possible issues at play, see here and here and here. In my case, it seems related to the /etc/resolv.conf file is normally automatically managed by NetworkManager. The issue seems to pop up whenever I have connected to a VPN provided and disconnected again. It seems this modifies the resolv file, adding a server entry to which I can obviously no longer connect after disconnecting the VPN. After disconnecting, it seems the entry is not removed. Therefore whenever I try to resolve a name, it will try this nameserver, wait a few seconds until time-out before moving on to the next entry, yielding very slow connection times.

While it is not generally recommended, I could solve the issue by editing the resolv.conf file and commenting out this first nameserver entry. Restarting the computer automatically resets resolv.conf. To fix this issue permanently, adding dns=none to /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf seems to do the trick.