OUCH! Slowww... networking on Leopard

[ostuneup]

My day job is being a tech support rep for C****st high speed cable internet services - and we are getting a lot of calls from Mac Leopard users.

From what I'm seeing - if you connect a Mac Leopard into any home networking device - i.e. your router: everything else on the network will get painfully slow.

This includes Windows based PCs and network-attached games such as Xbox and Playstation.

Due to this situation a lot of people think it has to be the Internet Service Provider and may think that they have to upgrade to a faster speed-tier.

But what this really means is that something in Leopard is producing a lot of error traffic on the home network - which uses up the bandwidth and processing capabilities of the router as well as the host computer.

 

[corbywan]

Having used Leopard on your service, and the fact that a friend has Leopard Macs on his LAN connected to your service, I can say that that just isn't the case across the board. It may be some kind of back ground process kicking in (Software Update?) when they connect, but nothing in the OS.

There must be something more to the patter of these Macs. Brand new just brought home and first time plugged in? Does the slowness go away after a time of being plugged in? There must be more. Consistency of a model of router these users have? I've used a Linksys with the Linksys OS and DD-WRT with no worries, Airport Extreme (G and N) with no such problems.

 

[plinden]

I presume you're asking for help?

I have three Macs running Leopard, a PC running XP and an iPhone (plus occasionally a Linux VM running in VMWare) all connected simultaneously via an Airport Extreme Base Station and I consistently get 5Mb/s download speed on all computers on my AT&T 6Mb/s DSL. Prior to that I had a Netgear WRG614 and got the same wired speeds (wireless was flakey on all OSs which is why I switched the router).

What have you done to try to determine the cause? Have you looked at the DNS response times? Is there any common factor e.g. Comcast proxies/DNS servers/home routers/cable modems used?

One common factor seems to be Comcast ... have you actually looked into closely that or are you making assumptions?

 

[belvdr]

One common factor seems to be Comcast ... have you actually looked into closely that or are you making assumptions?

That's exactly what I'm thinking. The OP's comments would also mean that plugging a OS X Leopard machine into any network would slow it down.

My suggestion to the OP is to have the user run tcpdump and see what traffic is being generated.

 

[jacobluecke]

More and more, I believe Apple did something with a recent update that messed up something with the DNS system.
I, too, was about to call my provider because my intel iMac's internet speed seriously declined last weekend.
But I did some searching around and took a suggestion to switch to an OpenDNS server. It instantly brought the net back up to speed, actually even better than it was before.
I'm trying to spread the news of this fix, as it's helped quite a few people. For those out there with this problem, I'd suggest giving it a try, it's very easy. You'll have to manually change you network preferences to use these DNS servers:
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
There is more info at http://www.opendns.com

 

[corbywan]

More and more, I believe Apple did something with a recent update that messed up something with the DNS system.
I, too, was about to call my provider because my intel iMac's internet speed seriously declined last weekend.
But I did some searching around and took a suggestion to switch to an OpenDNS server. It instantly brought the net back up to speed, actually even better than it was before.
I'm trying to spread the news of this fix, as it's helped quite a few people. For those out there with this problem, I'd suggest giving it a try, it's very easy. You'll have to manually change you network preferences to use these DNS servers:
208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
There is more info at http://www.opendns.com

Maybe I'm missing something, but why does changing your DNS servers fix a problem with your Mac? If anything it suggests that there may be a problem with the home router that is relaying the DNS server info, or a problem with the ISPs DNS servers. It may be a glitch between the DNS client and certain DNS servers, but it isn't an across the board, Mac-only problem. I'm on Verizon and all my Macs are fine, my dad is on Comcast with several Macs running leopard, PPC and Intel, all with no problem.

 

[plinden]

Due to the recent DNS poisoning exploit, ISPs have had to upgrade their DNS servers. If people have noticed slowdowns suddenly happening in the past 3-4 weeks, there's a good chance it's related to a mishandled DNS server upgrade.

OpenDNS servers were not vulnerable to the exploit so didn't need to be touched.

 

[Consultant]

Please take your unsubstianted claims elsewhere.
(Well looks like you did, but no bites elsewhere)
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=7139669#19

Trying to bring OSX down to level of vista is a far stretch in someone's imagination.