Mac OS or WIFI to blame?

[profmjh]

Ever since I got my new Virgin SuperHub, I've found Safari can be really frustratingly slow. Often, but not always, the progress bar will move an inch and just sit there stubbornly. Usually if I click reload, it will whoosh along and load the page. Similarly, I'm regularly getting Mail telling me there's a connection problem: turning WIFI off and on again seems to deal with that.

Yet whenever I do a speed test on my WIFI from my Mac I get great results. I just ran one now: Ping 16ms, Download 73.35Mbps, Upload 5.07Mbps.

All this happens even if I'm sitting within 6ft of the router.

Any ideas or suggestions?

 

[2984839]

Ever since I got my new Virgin SuperHub, I've found Safari can be really frustratingly slow. Often, but not always, the progress bar will move an inch and just sit there stubbornly. Usually if I click reload, it will whoosh along and load the page. Similarly, I'm regularly getting Mail telling me there's a connection problem: turning WIFI off and on again seems to deal with that.

Yet whenever I do a speed test on my WIFI from my Mac I get great results. I just ran one now: Ping 16ms, Download 73.35Mbps, Upload 5.07Mbps.

All this happens even if I'm sitting within 6ft of the router.

Any ideas or suggestions?

It sounds like the DNS requests are taking a long time if your connection is fast once you've reached a site. Open a terminal and run this

dig www.google.com

This will send a DNS request for www.google.com and display some info. The query time is what you're interested in. It should be fairly low (4 ms for my machine right now). Replace www.google.com with a URL that you have not visited yet to make sure the DNS record hasn't been cached and see what kind of result you get. Doing this with several websites will give you a better idea if DNS is the culprit.

 

[profmjh]

It sounds like the DNS requests are taking a long time if your connection is fast once you've reached a site. Open a terminal and run this

dig www.google.com

This will send a DNS request for www.google.com and display some info. The query time is what you're interested in. It should be fairly low (4 ms for my machine right now). Replace www.google.com with a URL that you have not visited yet to make sure the DNS record hasn't been cached and see what kind of result you get. Doing this with several websites will give you a better idea if DNS is the culprit.

I tried that. The times varied a lot, which I assume is more about the distance to the server. I tried random sites I've never visited. The fastest time was 2ms for a server near where I live. The slowest was about 650ms, which was for a server in the US (I'm in the UK).

So my feeling is that it's not a DNS problem?

 

[2984839]

I tried that. The times varied a lot, which I assume is more about the distance to the server. I tried random sites I've never visited. The fastest time was 2ms for a server near where I live. The slowest was about 650ms, which was for a server in the US (I'm in the UK).

So my feeling is that it's not a DNS problem?

That seems normal to me. The next thing to do is run traceroute to see where the bottleneck is. If you know which sites were giving you trouble, I'd try it for them first.

traceroute www.someurlhere.com

The largest time in milliseconds is the hop that is slowing you down the most.

 

[canyelles]

You could try modifying the way DNS prefetching works. See here ...

http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutor...and-non-loading-webpages-in-safari--mac-51338

 

[profmjh]

I've just tried this fix I found on stackexchange and it seems to be working: