Internet Slow on Macintosh

SkyHog

SkyHog

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I'm running Mac OS 10.5.8, and the internet is ungodly slow. My fiancee's Windows based computer has fine internet speeds and sits right next to the Mac. I also have no problems using the wifi through our Wii either.

Any ideas what could be causing this slowdown?
 
LOL! Actually, I figured it out.....

Macintosh sucks with DNS. Need to do custom DNS stuff? Yeah, don't bother unless you want the Mac to search for every DNS, regardless of whether its available or not. I was doing some VPN stuff.

Sigh...stupid Apple.
 
SkyHog said:
LOL! Actually, I figured it out.....

Macintosh sucks with DNS. Need to do custom DNS stuff? Yeah, don't bother unless you want the Mac to search for every DNS, regardless of whether its available or not. I was doing some VPN stuff.

Sigh...stupid Apple.
Click to expand...
Mac sucks with DNS? You mean the DNS layer that works the same as pretty much any Unix system? It will search in the order in which you put the servers until it finds a hit. If it can't reach it then yes it'll slow down a bit. Windows works the same way.

Linux, Windows, Mac OS - don't put DNS servers that can't be reached in front of DNS servers that can be reached.
 
My wife's iMac (with 10.5.x) did the same thing when I tried similar things for VPN access. It was fine as long as it was on the VPN, but painfully slow off the VPN. It seems the timeout for unreachable servers is longer than others I've seen. That said, I like the way that they do it better. Jesse is right. It isn't their fault that we purposefully put unreachable DNS servers in.

I found that most VPN clients actually support altering the DNS servers on connect. That's how I ended up fixing the problem the right way. I set the client to insert (and use) the additional DNS server when it connected.
 
FlyNE said:
My wife's iMac (with 10.5.x) did the same thing when I tried similar things for VPN access. It was fine as long as it was on the VPN, but painfully slow off the VPN. It seems the timeout for unreachable servers is longer than others I've seen. That said, I like the way that they do it better. Jesse is right. It isn't their fault that we purposefully put unreachable DNS servers in.

I found that most VPN clients actually support altering the DNS servers on connect. That's how I ended up fixing the problem the right way. I set the client to insert (and use) the additional DNS server when it connected.
Click to expand...

I agree to a point, but the problem is if I have 5 DNS servers configured, and 3 of them suddenly go away, so the list looks like this:

1. Good
2. Good
3. Bad
4. Bad
5. Bad

Why would it continue to search the bads after finding the goods? That doesn't make any sense.
 
SkyHog said:
I agree to a point, but the problem is if I have 5 DNS servers configured, and 3 of them suddenly go away, so the list looks like this:

1. Good
2. Good
3. Bad
4. Bad
5. Bad

Why would it continue to search the bads after finding the goods? That doesn't make any sense.
Click to expand...

It shouldn't. And, from my experience, doesn't.
 
Nick,

While rummaging around on the Internet tonight, I found this interesting link on disabling DHCP-given DNS servers on Mac OS X. Sounds similar to what you might've been seeing.
 
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