That's an interesting case, pathologically speaking. It's bizarre to
hear that moving to 9.04 ever "fixed" anything for anyone, since 9.04
was such a disaster performance-wise for so many users. Those with intel
or ati graphics were particularly hard hit, but the disk I/O performance
problems affected all.

There are several things that could case long link loading times, but I
can't imagine any of them which would be fixed by reverting to 9.04 -
that just doesn't compute, so let's ignore that data point and try to
zero in on the cause of the delays.

1. Name resolution services - is your designated dns server fast and
reliable?
Try a test - use the following command:

time host www.chowking.com

record the output, then repeat the command and record the output again.

On an ubuntu box at my house it looks like this:

jjs@libby:~$ time host www.chowking.com
www.chowking.com has address 61.28.168.121

real 0m0.743s
user 0m0.020s
sys 0m0.000s
jjs@libby:~$ time host www.chowking.com
www.chowking.com has address 61.28.168.121

real 0m0.439s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
jjs@libby:~$

How do your numbers compare?

Over the years I've found that running a local caching dns server on
linux provides a huge speedup over the typical laggy dns servers
provided by ISPs.

2. Local system resource bottlenecks - you might be pressed for RAM, I/O
or CPU.

Please show the output of the command:

top -n 1

3. Browser woes - perhaps the problem is in the browser itself. It's
always useful to have other browsers to compare with. For instance, I
find that google chrome for linux comes up in a fraction of a second,
while OTOH firefox takes several seconds to appear.