Comments on: Latency? This. Is. Infiniteloop!

Question: Latency? This. Is. Infiniteloop!

selfnoise — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:28:23 -0800

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?

By: jeffamaphone

jeffamaphone — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:39:55 -0800

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.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:26:51 -0800

No go... still the same problem. Good idea, though!

By: azpenguin

azpenguin — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:56:57 -0800

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.

By: selfnoise

selfnoise — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:59:24 -0800

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.

By: Dub

Dub — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:07:14 -0800

(Guess) Try different DNS settings?

By: rdn

rdn — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:34:54 -0800

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!