Slow internet after Lion OS X Upgrade

I'm having a similar problem - particularly with Spotify. Music just pauses intermittently while streaming, which makes the monthly fee totally pointless. Either my ISP is throttling my line in punishment for the 3.5gb Lion download, or Lion is slowing everything down by itself. I'm inclined to think it's the latter, as Xbox Live and web browsing are still fine. So unimpressed with Lion - total waste of money.

Huh that's strange. Just for fun I rand a speed test today and my connection is exactly the speed it should be, 25Mbps... now I have no idea what was going on before. Maybe Lion wasn't the cause. 😕

Have you tried flushing DNS cache?

1. Open Terminal App from Applications > Utilities folder.
2. Type (without quotes): "nslookup google.com" + return key
3. Notice how fast the response back was.
4. Type (without quotes): "dscacheutil -flushcache" + return key
5. Notice if it was faster returning the response, there maybe no change.
6. Close Terminal App, and do an internet speedtest. Like using: http://www.speedtest.net

Regards,

Spec Ops

Folks,

Tried all of the suggestions with little or no success. Internet speed test gives me my actual speed but opening any website with Firefox or Chrome takes way too long. Safari speed is OK, but still far slower than my Windows PC (I am an IT pro with 40 years experience and have to use both because of work).

I sure hope Apple will do something about this performance, soon! Just ordered a MBP and would hate to have to downgrade the OS. Will wait and test to see what happens when the MBP arrives and will keep monitoring this topic in the meantime, and post if I find anything new. In the meantime I am playing with network configurations to see if it makes any difference.

Hi olenco,

If it ships with lion, you can't downgrade it. Sorry.

How about IPv6? tried turning it off in system preferences? perhaps it's got a local loopback issue?

Regards,

Spec Ops

Thanks Spec Ops, but wouldn't that affect Safari as well? Safari works at normal speeds.

Bellieve it or not, some of the online apps I use require Firefox or they won't work.

Turning IPv6 to Link-local only has not effect. Hmmm, local loop... what could be causing that, if indeed this is what is happening?

Hi,

"local loopback issue" = can't see itself in the network. For when the host file/DNS cache gets all messed up or conflicts with another device in the network.

Your issue could be like a DHCP router handing out IPv6 information incorrectly, especially annoying if you don't need IPv6 - like at home. Turning off IPv6 in small networks has solved simlar issues for me. Turning it off on the client is just a troubleshooting step, turning off IPv6 in your network should be done in the router level not on the client.

I thought you said that Safari was slow? If it's the other web browsers, have you tried updating FireFox and Chrome? I know that is obvious, just checking. If Safari is fine, then I'd say the issue is with other applications. Have you tried:

• closing firefox, if open
• moving the mozilla folder out of "~/Library/Application Support" folder
• moving the mozilla/firefox folder out of "~/Library/Preferences" folder
• relaunch firefox

Firefox will have lost it's bookmarks and settings, but test the speed of the site you have slowness problems with. If no change, close firefox and move folders back into place, relaunch firefox.

You could also trying running Firefox in safe mode: option key + click firefox icon in dock, then click "continue in safe mode". Test your site, this is to see if there is a pluging slowing you down.

If it was a system wide network slowness not limited by one or two web apps, then the other drastic step could be to delete all the network configuration plist's, restart, and configure your client again (add wifi password, etc).

Good hunting,

Spec Ops

I was somewhat skeptical about this advice as another document linked off of the one provided [http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1242] states "does not store network settings in PRAM".

However, after following the instructions everything is working much better.

As an example of issues I was seeing over wifi - I was unable to watch a movie stored on iMac on same network. Screen sharing to iMac from MBP would not connect. facebook, gmail and youtube were all very slow and often timed out while loading/watching. http://www.speedtest.net would load [100%] but never began its testing. I tried web-pages in Safari and Firefox 6.0.

I shall monitor for the rest of the week.

PRAM reset can't hurt though. Also doing a permissions repair and single-user mode file system check wouldn't hurt either.

Seems I didn't have to wait long for my troubles to return - this morning youtube, speedtest, gmail and thunderbird are all struggling to work. MenuMeters shows receive rate is back to 1.6kb - where as it was over 10mb after the reset yesterday.

What's happened since yesterday?

- I have put the MBP to sleep (lid).

- I have plugged in an Ethernet cable.

I'll reboot later and see which one - if any - provokes this issue again.

Folks,

Finally did a PRAM/NVRAM reset. Safari still fast, FireFox and Chrome still slugish. One particular page, takes 30 secs to open in FF, 25 to open in Chrome and only 5 sec to download completely in Safari. Go figure!

This is on a late 2009 Mac Mini, 2GHz dual-core with 4GB RAM and Lion, of course. My Internet speed is nominal in most other apps (I haven't tested all of them). I only have/pay for 6 Mbps and get virtually all of it because of IPTV which is 25 Mbps. Internet speed tests are consistent, at any time and from different computers.

My router is not dishing out IPv6 addresses, only IPv4. Mac Mini is setup with link-local IPv6 address only. Three other "Windoze" PCs work much faster than the Mac. All are plugged in to a 1 Gbps desktop Ethernet switch, which in turn is plugged into the router (10 Mbps Ethernet). The same setup always worked flawlessly under Snow Leopard, and no changes other than the ones mentioned above on the Mac Mini, have been made to any of the network.

Your guess is as good as mine, but it is starting to look like Apple needs to fix something in OS X Lion, and soon (i.e.: before I receive my MBP).

Can't specifically say what causes the issue to start. In the office I was unable to provoke a slow-down.

This evening at home however things were one again very poor. Don't jump to cause folks - its not the home network as I've seen the slow down in several places including the office.

I thought I had captured some diagnostic commands from terminal session but alas 'Export text as' seems to have saved the "other window" and not the one I had intended. I collected output from 'netstat -in', 'netstat -rn', 'ping 192.168.0.1' default router as shown by netstat. The ping showed 80% packet loss. Running 'sudo dtruss ping 192.168.0.1' I saw "sendto(0x3, address, 0x40) = 64 0" followed by a 'timeout' error message. Doing the same now rather than the error message I see a following call to select(0x4 ...) followed by recvmsg(0x3, address, 0x0). So it seems my packets were just not getting out on to the network - but I'm not sure how I can measure that, I didn't see any obvious error count in 'netstat -s', suggestions?

alls0rts wrote: The ping showed 80% packet loss.

This sounds like something fishy has to be going on in your home network. Have you tried changing the patch cable at least? I ran the same tests as you did and I get no errors, no packet loss whatsoever. If this was happening when you ping a site on the Internet only, it would be a different story altogether, but on your local network is a clear indication that something is wrong locally.

What happens when you ping the localhost? Do you have any other devices on your home network? What is plugged into the router's switch? I have seen a similar problem happen when there is a local loop on the network. Recently someone in my office plugged an ethernet patch cord between two ports on the same switch, creating a loop that the distribution layer switch was not configured to handle, since we turned off Spanning Tree Protocol. This can easily happen by accident.

Do you have any other computers you can use to test, or perhaps a friend or neighbor that has a laptop. Try to test with a different cable and a different port on the router's switch. I don't mean to sound patronizing, just trying to help.

alls0rts, try to ping both 127.0.0.1 as well as the current IP address of your Mac, which I assume was provided by the DHCP server on your router. Is there any difference in the results?

Olenco, Thanks for your response - but as I explained the issue moves with the MBP between work and the office. Before I installed Lion it worked flawlessly. I appreciate that perhaps something has gone wrong with my MBP. But as I write this I'm connected to home WIFi without any issues while before I left the office it would not connect to anything.

I installed wireshark (using ports) last night and so when the WiFi failed at work I ran it up on the interface. It did seem to show some external traffic making me think its not totally dead - as the ping failure might suggest. But then I know I can access some web pages all be it very slowly as if packet loss is occurring. I wasn't able to dig to deep as I had work to do. But I did notice un-answered ARP requests for the default router from my MBP.... I need to dig deeper.

I'm wondering myself if the wifi driver gets messed up. Anyone know how to reinitialise it - unload/load it? Turning off the WiFi from System Preferences and turning it back on does not help. I see ifconfig(8) is available to me and has some intersting options so I may try that next.

BTW, I did try pinging localhost which worked well, as did the local IP address which 'netstat -rn' shows is actually a route to localhost. One other point of interest is that I see IPv6 address has also been set. Alas I don't know if that was the case on Snow Leopard as I never needed to check.