Safari loading pages slowly / high latency

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Level 1

4 points

Safari loading pages slowly / high latency

I have recently been asked by one of my clients to look at a problem with their 3 macs at their place of business. They are an iMac, a macbook and a macbook air. They have all started to exhibit the same problem of being slow to load web pages using safari as their web browser of choice.
Using the broadband speed test at speedtest.net shows that they are getting some extremely high latency (~4000ms) to some sites.
I have tested the broadband connection thoroughly using my own (linux) laptop and everything seems to be in working order. Tests on the macs themselves using a terminal show that latency to the internet and dns response times are all as they should be.

From some limited searching the problem appears to be similar to the problem described in http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8799710&#8799710 where safari itself is causing some problems for some reason.

What I'm looking for is some suggestions on how i can go about fixing the problem when i next visit the client

Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Apr 1, 2009 9:29 PM

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Answer 1

Klaus1

Level 9

52,879 points

Apr 2, 2009 2:53 AM in response to iiridium

Welcome to the forums!

The following usually works on both Tiger and Leopard:

(First, if yours is an Intel Mac, check that Safari is not running in Rosetta, which is enough to slow it to a crawl.)

Adding DNS codes to your Network Settings, should gives good results in terms of speed-up:

Open System Preferences/Network. Double click on your connection type, or select it in the drop-down menu. Click on TCP/IP and in the box marked 'DNS Servers' enter the following two numbers:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

(An explanation of why that is both safe and a good idea can be read here: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/opendsn-what-is-opendns-why-required-2/2587 / )

Whilst in System Preferences/Network you should also turn off 'IPv6' in your preference pane, as otherwise you may not get the full speed benefit (the DNS resolver will default to making SRV queries). If you want to know what IPv6 is:

This is Apple's guidance on iPv6:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8708.html

Click on Apply Now and close the window.

Restart Safari, and repair permissions.

If that didn't do it, then try this as well:

Empty Safari's cache (from the Safari menu), then close Safari.

Go to Home/Library/Safari and delete the following files:

form values
download.plist

Then go to Home/Library/Preferences and delete

com.apple.Safari.plist

Repair permissions (in Disk Utility).

Start up Safari again, and things should have improved.

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Answer 2

Apr 2, 2009 4:46 PM in response to iiridium

well i had the same problems before so i did everything everyone suggested and also uninstalled beta 4 for safari, then i checked my internet provider on some support issues. it just turns out that they updated their dns servers. i then entered in the new numbers and hit apply. that instantly changed how fast everything was. before i was loading a web page that took 1 and a half mins. to load before. i went to speedtest.net to check to make sure i was getting the speed i had ordered. according to the site my d/l speed and u/l speed checked out. 18 mbps down and 1.5 mbps up. then after the updated dns server #'s were entered, that page that took 1 and a half mins. to load now takes 3 secs. it was an animated map for weather.com in motion. i now am going to currently update to safari 4 beta and see if everything still works fine. i will keep people updated.

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Answer 3

Apr 8, 2009 5:36 PM in response to Abel Mecklenburg

well i updated to safari 4 and everything is in working order. so the problem was having the wrong dsn server #'s

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