Latency? This. Is. Infiniteloop!
July 3, 2009 12:28 PM Subscribe
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?
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?
Response by poster: No go... still the same problem. Good idea, though!
posted by selfnoise at 4:26 PM on July 3, 2009
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
posted by azpenguin at 4:56 PM on July 3, 2009
Response by poster: 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
posted by selfnoise at 4:59 PM on July 3, 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
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
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by jeffamaphone at 12:39 PM on July 3, 2009