Computer VERY slow when interacting with new domain.

http://www.reedcorner.net/mpg/

Please click the link below, which leads to Apple's home page. Does it load slowly or at normal speed?

http://17.149.160.49

From the menu bar, select

 ▹ System Preferences... ▹ Network ▹ Advanced... ▹ DNS

Under DNS Servers you should have one or more numerical addresses, such as “192.168.1.1” or “10.0.0.1”. What are those addresses?

Please read this whole message and be sure you understand all of it before doing anything.

Write down the server addresses.

Click Cancel to close the Advanced sheet. Unlock the preference pane, if necessary, by clicking the lock icon in the lower left corner and entering your password. Open the DNS tab again and change the server addresses to the following:

8.8.8.8

8.8.4.4

That's Google DNS. Click OK, then Apply.

In Safari, select

Safari ▹ Preferences... ▹ Privacy ▹ Remove All Website Data

and confirm. (Do the equivalent if you’re using another browser.) Test. Any difference?

Notes:

1. If you lose Internet access after making the above change to your network settings, delete the Google servers in the Network preference pane, then select the TCP/IP tab and click Renew DHCP Lease. That should restore the original DNS settings; otherwise restore them yourself.

2. I’m not advocating Google or anything else as a DNS provider; the server addresses are offerred merely for testing purposes. There may be privacy issues involved in using that service, which you should investigate personally before you decide whether to keep the settings. Other public DNS services exist.

If "Rapport" is installed, back up all data, then remove it.

You need to do traceroutes to all the places you're tying to hit. It's very possible that the network you're on could have a web proxy in place that's causing this browsing problem while it caches those sites to serve to the local network. If you go to terminal and do a traceroute ipaddress or domainname and see what the route looks like. If you see the times jump high at a certain hop, you know where your issues are. If you do not, then you need to test the same sites via another computer in the same office (preferably on the same drop or WIFI AP yours is connected to so as to limit variables) and if that one behaves without issues, then your problem is localized to your MacBook.

There's been a whole lot of "slow wifi" or "slow web browsing" threads lately that I find it strange that they're not related in some way shape or form... no matter how minute it could be. Nothing just happens for no reason.

Then it sounds like it's just something on the OS. I don't think it's a network card issue because if it was, you'd see issues even during traceroute. That said, have you tried doing a repair install of OSX? If you run recovery and reinstall without erasing, it'll refresh the OS and keep all your stuff in place. Just make sure you do a proper backup beforehand just in case something goes wrong.

Also, come to think of it, the Recovery bootup also has the ability to allow you to browse the web via Safari in that mode. Try just that before anything else and see if it's fast. If it is, then you know it's the OS install that's goofed up somehow and causing this. It's the only explanation unless you can think of anything you might have changed hardware/software wise right before this problem started to happen.

Very nice. Would have been nice if you had kept the old .bak files and gone back to compare/contrast between the two. As I said, recently a ton of users have been in the forums asking about similar problems (slow network access) and it's good to know that it's just the preference files doing it, but would have been awesome to see if it's something specific or just a general corruption or abundance of entries in it that's causing said behavior.