upgraded to snow leopard, or should that be slow leopard?

September 17, 2009 11:19 PM

Help! I upgraded to snow leopard and now my internet is painfully slow. A quick google search shows i'm not the only one, but the only fix I can find (to do with the firewall) doesn't help me as I don't have firewall on. There seems to be no difference between Safari and Firefox. I'm seriously considering using time machine to get back to Leopard days. As an example, pre snow leopard, a speed test measured at 1.83mb/s download, 0.16mb/s upload and 41ms latency, speed test just now says 0.46mb/s, 0.24mb/s upload and 51ms latency. Therefore it looks like my upload speed has improved by my download has taken a dial up style kicking. As I don't upload anything very often, I don't care about any improvement in this area. Can anyone assist? I'm running a January 2009 macbook if that helps.
posted by nunoidia to computers & internet (7 answers total)

What does your modem say about its connection speed? It may have reconnected at a lower speed coincidentally while you were upgrading.
posted by malevolent at 1:36 AM on September 18, 2009

"I upgraded to snow leopard and now my internet is painfully slow."

The chance that these two things are related is somewhat slim. Not zero, but slim enough that you should ignore the possibility of correlation for now. Can you describe what "my internet" means? What kind of equipment is involved? Who's the ISP? Over what sort of line? What did your ISP say when you told them about your throughput problems?
posted by majick at 5:36 AM on September 18, 2009

Did you also apply the 10.6.1 update to Snow Leopard?
Are you connected wirelessly or via a wired connection?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:45 AM on September 18, 2009

I noticed some slowness when I first started using Snow Leopard which eventually went away. Try restarting everything, including your modem and router.

You can also try opening Activity Monitor (Applications/Utility) and see if there are any errant processes taking up your bandwidth.
posted by whiskeyspider at 6:44 AM on September 18, 2009

I don't know how to see what my router is telling me. But speed test on my pc is fine (wired connection to same router).

I'm on wireless in the UK, ISP is plusnet. Using their supplied router and time machine. I applied the update.

Given that the other computer is ok, I still think its snow leopard given other users seem to have the same issue.

And by my internet, I mean my web browsing, everything. What else is there?!!
posted by nunoidia at 10:33 AM on September 18, 2009

dumb question probably, but how do I see in Activity Monitor what is hogging bandwidth? There doesn't seem to be a column for that? Clicking on network doesn't tell me a lot...
posted by nunoidia at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2009

I am still running 10.4, but had a similar problem across three browsers (Safari, FF, and Opera), when I installed the newest version of Safari, so I wonder if that's your problem. I also didn't have issues with connection speed on my other computers and it does seem to be a reasonably common issue.

Anyway, I tried a whole bunch of fixes and couldn't figure it out, so I started using OpenDNS and the connection speed improved dramatically.
posted by lalex at 1:17 PM on September 18, 2009