Latency? This. Is. Infiniteloop!

July 3, 2009 12:28 PM

Help me try and fix my mother's weird internet/Mac Mini issue.

So, my mother has a Mac Mini. This is one of the older PowerPC ones... no wireless. It's connected via a cat5 cable to a ZyXel wireless router, which is then connected to a DSL modem. The problem she has is a delay between requesting a webpage and having it start to load (in any web browser). Since I am a Windows user, I don't know much about Macs, so I am at a loss.

Pertinent factoids:

-When I go to dslreports.com and run a speed test, I get a latency of between 500-900ms, which seems really high.

-When I ping google.com from within OS X's network dialog, however, the latency looks normal.

-My netbook and another Windows PC can connect wirelessly without this issue. I also connected my netbook to the router using the same cat5 cable; no issue.

-I tried setting the DNS servers to opendns instead of the default; no change.

Apparently the system did not originally have this issue. Any ideas?

posted by selfnoise to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Try swapping connecting the machine directly to the DSL modem and see if things improve. If so, your ZyXel is the problem and should be replaced.
posted by jeffamaphone at 12:39 PM on July 3, 2009

No go... still the same problem. Good idea, though!
posted by selfnoise at 4:26 PM on July 3, 2009

Dumb question - have you restarted the Mac? I have one of the old PowerPC Minis too, and it rarely has had a problem, but I can think of two occasions in the past where I had to restart the computer to get internet connectivity back.
posted by azpenguin at 4:56 PM on July 3, 2009

Yeah, sorry, I tried that too. Really I think it must be either a software or hardware issue with the Mini itself, but I have zero experience with OS X so I'm not sure where to begin.
posted by selfnoise at 4:59 PM on July 3, 2009

(Guess) Try different DNS settings?
posted by Dub at 6:07 AM on July 4, 2009

I had a similar problem at work -- OS X loaded web pages with a painfully long lag. There was a long (10-15-20 second) lag, followed by the page loading rather quickly, more or less. Safari would time out before many pages would lag, but Firefox eventually loaded them. This happened with any OS X Leopard computer on the network, but no others.

My best guess is that it's a problem with the way your router (DSL modem?) is handling Leopard's IPv6 addressing. Check out this article, which I barely understand myself.

At work, after our aging firewall was replaced, the problem was gone, and the internet was speedy again. I can't be sure, but I think it's the IPv6 thing. Good luck!
posted by rdn at 12:34 PM on July 5, 2009