Level 1

4 points

Slow DNS lookup on wireless, resolved -- but questions remain.

Hi.

I just bought a Macbook Pro 1.83GHz which arrived today. I love it.

While it instantly connected to my wireless network (I have a Linksys WAP54G) -- I immediately noticed when attempting to visit web sites that the DNS look up was excessively slow. It would take anywhere between 6-11 seconds to load a page. I've been fiddling with the issue all day, scouring these forums and others and nothing seemed to resolve this issue.

For the **** of it, I did an ipconfig /all on my PC to find out what the DNS servers were. I entered one of them directly into the network settings on my MBP, and whala, slow DNS look up resolved.

While that's great and all, it's not an acceptable permanent solution. I bought this notebook so I could work while I travel and entering a DNS address everytime I use a different wireless network *****. (Not to mention it is many times impossible to find out).

Anyone know why this may be happening? How can I /really/ resolve this without entering in the DNS server?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

macbook pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on May 4, 2006 1:18 PM

30 replies

Jun 19, 2006 5:39 PM in response to pixelguru

It quite suddenly started happening on my MacMini and AirPort extreme in the past week -- sometime after I upgraded to 10.46 (at least a week or two). Turning of IPv6 solved the problem nicely. Other Macs on the network (G4 tower and MacBook) have not experienced the symptoms at all.

Jun 19, 2006 7:38 PM in response to Ken Varnum

OK apple, clearly something is not right. I too tried turning off the ipv6 (not even sure what it is) but it didn't help.

pages seem to time out and i get that the network connection was reset.

anyone know what is going on?

Dell Dimension 8200 Windows XP Pro MBP 2.16 Ghz processor, 2 GB RAM, 100 GB HD

Jun 19, 2006 7:40 PM in response to Boating Dave

oh sometimes the error I get is "lost network connection" (NSURLErrorDomain: -1005)

anyone know what that means?

snowdrop

Level 1

0 points

Jun 24, 2006 11:31 AM in response to jhaff

Wow! Thanks I've my PowerBook 12" for 2 month now and this was is only post helping me to resolve the slow lookup problem.
I put the DNS server IP to System prefs->Network->DNS
But: not the one over my router, but the external DNS server IP.

vicchea

Level 1

0 points

Jun 24, 2006 6:48 PM in response to jhaff

windows obtains the DNS servers automatically from your router or modem whereas OS X makes you enter it manually. is there a way to have OS X auto obtain your DNS servers?

Jul 2, 2006 12:00 PM in response to Ken Varnum

The fix lasted a day or two -- but now my mini is back to a noticeable (5-10 second) delay each time I go anywhere. Anyone know where the Mac stores its local dns cache?

Updating to 10.4.7 didn't help, for what it's worth.

dm33

Level 1

0 points

Jul 5, 2006 11:27 PM in response to snowdrop

I've been having the same problem.
I'm using 802.11g wireless. It seemed fast initially, but I think it appears to be the DNS problem as folks have mentioned. I get amazingly slow page loads, often timing out. Yet when I run a speed test I'm getting almost 3mb/sec, ie very fast.

In desperation, I connected ethernet instead. That helped a little, maybe. Then I disabled ipv6 as folks have suggested. I don't know if that caused something else to change but right now it running faster than I've ever seen it run. Pretty much as fast as XP. I then switched back to wireless and its still running really fast. Hope it lasts.

I just bought the Macbook. It has 10.4.7, ie the latest patches on it.

This seems like a serious problem. One that would encourage many switchers to return their Mac and give up.

Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Jul 5, 2006 11:55 PM in response to jhaff

Same issue here, Macbook Pro 17 2 gig ram... Very fustrating. I have dissabled IPV6 No change. I find the net almost unsuable. Seems a little better load using Firefox for the mac, But I still have to double, sometimes triple click on links before a page will load correctly. These needs to be fixed.

dm33

Level 1

0 points

Jul 6, 2006 8:03 PM in response to jhaff

I thought disabling ipv6 was the solution. It worked when I did it. Not sure whats changed, but its no longer helping. I just added in the DNS server ip addresses and its working fast again. We'll see if after the next sleep or reboot cycle it goes back to being slow.

Is there an official support channel to get this resolved through Apple? I'm still within the initial 14 day return period and have run into several serious issues like this.

Jul 10, 2006 10:53 AM in response to dm33

It seems to me that there is an issue here, but I wonder if it is with older B routers?

While my MBP works flawlessly hardwired to the router, and has connected (well and easily) to my neighbors wireless signal, I can not stop the painfully slow (read non-existent) page loads.
ipv6 changes do nothing. I can get green lights all the way down on network diagnostics when I connect the MBP to my linksys wireless network, bit no pages! I can ping out and get reasonable responses, but for some reason the loads just pause and stop....

Chucksan

Level 1

0 points

Jul 12, 2006 6:17 PM in response to iVmichael

I just did the reconfiguration and it seems to make my internet connection runs much faster. However, I haven't loaded any new web pages yet.

Mira2006

Level 1

0 points

Jul 12, 2006 6:31 PM in response to jasonbuechler

I have the same experience. I'm dual booting MacOSX and windows Vista. Vista loads web pages faster than MacosX!

MBP 17'' Mac OS X (10.4.7) 2G Ram 100G HD 7200 rpm

Jul 17, 2006 1:50 PM in response to Chucksan

what "reconfiguration" did you do?

ncr100

Level 1

8 points

Aug 6, 2007 8:49 AM in response to pixelguru

I have had success with 'lookupd -flushcache'.

This is after hand-entering my ISP's DNS servers and disabling IPv6. Neither of which seemed to enable instant surfing, like my Windows XP laptop was able to achieve.

I'm no expert on DNS and don't want to be. I hope Apple takes performance seriously and tunes their consumer OS to work at least as fast as Windows.

Does anyone else twiddle their lookupd caches to achieve normal performance?

Aug 6, 2007 9:31 AM in response to jhaff

Periodically, I have a similar problem on a G4 Powerbook that connects wirelessly to a Motorola cable modem/wireless access point that's connected to Time Warner cable internet.

I spent the better part of day with medium-level tech support at TW before they finally told me it was a problem related to Mac OSX and the way it was interacting with my wireless network.

I've found that manually entering two OpenDNS addresses in network preferences works quite well...

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

I also found that manually entering almost any valid DNS addresses (including the dynamic Time Warner DNS addresses in my WAP) also works.

For more information about OpenDNS, go to:

http://www.opendns.com/

Hope this helps.

Message was edited by: Scott Newman

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Slow DNS lookup on wireless, resolved -- but questions remain.