Internet Slow on OSX, Fast on Windows :(

[cwd1]

I'm at my wit's end about this because it doesn't make any sense at all to me. I have a MacBook Pro with 2GB memory and a 2.16 gHz processor (Tiger, latest software update). Not exactly lame. Using Safari, I go to news.google.com and it displays pretty fast. Click on any link, and the time to display is in the 30-50 second range. I revised my link choices to only US/en sites like San Jose Mercury News or Seattle Times and same result.

What appears to be happening is that some subset of the page elements are being loaded, then Safari gives up. Going to the address bar and navigating to the site again and again allows elements to be loaded into the cache one at a time until finally the page displays.

I cleared my favicon cache, reset Safari, cleared history and cache, dumped pref, turned off the firewall. No improvement. I even shut off IPv6. I tested against Firefox and Camino and they are slow too.

This is where it gets weird: Opening IE7 in Parallels on the same machine using the same net connection gives me lickety-split speed.

Anyone have an idea what's causing all my native OSX clients to be slow, whereas Windows in Parallels accesses the net at full bandwidth?

Thanks

 

[Ric]

Hi there and welcome,

unfortunately Safari and the underlying WebKit have a few problems...

This may help speed things up a bit...

Quit out of Safari...then.

Depending on how you connect to the Internet...ie Airport or ethernet...

Go to System Preferences-->Network-->Airport-->TCP/IP-->DNS Servers change this to 4.2.2.2

or if you connect via Airport...

Go to System Preferences-->Network-->Ethernet-->TCP/IP-->DNS Servers change this to 4.2.2.2

Then go to Applications-->Utilities-->Terminal

...and type in

lookupd -flushcache

then press return.

Then give Safari another go...

regards

Ric

 

[cwd1]

This worked like a charm. I'm surprised there isn't more on the net about it. It's odd that it would only crop up as an issue in the last 3-4 weeks. Is this an area where WebKit is being worked on, or is that information even available.

In any case, it seems to have returned my browser's performance to acceptable and I certainly appreciate this.