Safari - speed tests and pings

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Level 1

8 points

Safari - speed tests and pings

Hi

Not sure this is a Safari 6.x or 7.x problem as prior to upgrading to Mavericks I was experiencing similar issues.

On our work network, 200MB leased line, we're connecting our Mac estate over CAT6 yet we're experiencing extremely slow loading and hanging with Safari.

Having run some speed tests using other browsers and Network Utility it's apparent that there is an issue with Safari on upgraded machines and those 'out of the box' machines.

Ping tests on Chrome and NU are approx 1-3ms which is what we would expect (PCs are always 1ms), however in Safari ping tests range from 30-500ms constantly. We cannot get it below 30ms.

We have reset browsers, turned off extensions and still no joy.

Anybody else noticed the difference in speed?

Thanks

OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Mar 31, 2014 1:59 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 31, 2014 5:44 AM in response to London_Blue

I am guessing that you are running a 'broadband' speed-test. These run their tests either in Adobe Flash or Javascript, the web-browser itself cannot do 'pings'. The different therefore is more likely to be how fast either Javascript or more likely Flash runs in a particular browser.

If you want to test a ping test at a computer level then you should either do this in Terminal.app by typing

ping address.to.ping

or use Network Utility which used to be in the Utilities folder but is now in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications

Note: Most broadband speedtest sites do not work well on corporate high-speed leased-lines like yours, they have been designed for testing ADSL level speeds of up to 20Mbps and not leased-lines of 100Mbps or more.

I would not expect a ping response of below 10ms for any host outside your own local network no matter the speed of your link, however anything above 30ms would equally be considered slow for a leased-line. A mobile phone over a mobile data link would (alas) typically get much slower ping responses.

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Answer 2

London_Blue Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 31, 2014 6:05 AM in response to John Lockwood

Hi

Thanks for the response but perhaps I've not explained myself fully.

Safari is basically 'hanging' when attempting to search or load a favourite bookmark. The ping test was something I undertook to see what was happening within Safari itself. And it was markedly different when compared to the network utility and Google Chrome - fair enough there would be slight differences, but that significant?

I must stress this is happening on a number of machines too that are running Mavericks.

Tony

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Answer 3

ApMaX

Level 2

152 points

Jun 22, 2014 11:06 AM in response to London_Blue

Indeed! Same problem here:

Safari high latecy vs Chrome low latency on SpeedTest

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6356622

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