why does my mac take so long?

[Fredb51]

Without knowing exactly how your network is configured it's difficult to be precise, but it sounds to me like you may have had an IP conflict. In System Preferences/Network/Built-In Ethernet/TCP/IP there's a button "Renew DHCP Lease" which in cases like this is often worth a press (that is assuming that your Mac is set to DHCP in the first place). As previously mentioned it's a great idea to make sure your computer or router is accessing a nippy DNS server. DNS servers are basically the phone books that translate website names into the addresses networking equipment needs to use to find the appropriate host. Some are way more efficient than others. Your ISP should be able to help with this.
As regards the Mac/PC issue, we encounter similar problems from time to time with Windows, Linux, Irix, OS9, OSX, Solaris- you name it, we use it, and it's going to spit the dummy at some point.

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

well. although the new DNS servers had speeded browsing up. i coincidentally lost all LAN connection to my PCs & printers

deleted the new entries & now everything works as it should, including firefox and safari. WTF happened there then?

if it really was a dog, it would have been drowned at birth

surely you're mistaken and this is all a bad dream.

we all know , sorry ....... are TOLD that Mac's 'just work' straight out of the box.

 

[cookie]

surely you're mistaken and this is all a bad dream.

we all know , sorry ....... are TOLD that Mac's 'just work' straight out of the box.

as computer experts Public Enemy famously said "don't believe the hype"

 

[Fanum]

Smug Mac owners will get exactly what's coming to them

Not that I'm saying you're a smug Mac owner of course Cookie, but you know what I mean.

The bubble is about to be well and truly popped

 

[brassmonkey001]

Of course you are right, I'd choose my next computer on that basis too!

Good show old boy!

I think you misunderstood my post.
The issue that Cookie is having sounds like why I got rid of the Mac. It eventually became slower at almost everything and almost unusable for internet surfing. It wouldn't do any sort of video and couldn't be upgraded or improved any further and there where many compatibility issues that were getting me down. Perhaps someone more computer savvy than myself could have tweaked a bit more life out of it, but ultimately it was just outdated.

 

[Carl]

why does my mac take so long to find and display a website now? was fine yesterday tea time, later same evening, and it's like wading through treacle

suddenly there seems to be some funky connectivity issue. web pages take ages to load, or don't load at all. first it seemed it was just safari, then Firefox decided to stage a go slow as well. email takes a while to send or receive. itunes store barely accessible. some sites affected more than others,amazon.uk and ebay particularly bad, this site, much better.
feels like a really crap wi-fi connection issue, but it's on an ethernet cable.

meanwhile 2 x windows machines carry on doing what they are supposed to do unnaffected as usual.

DNS? POS more like.

Dont know if you have solved this yet, but a couple of things:

There was a trojan horse fairly recently affecting DNS addresses by exploiting a weakness in Quicktime, this should have been fixed with a patch by now. Have you dowloaded any codecs lately? If so this may be the problem.

Some people have reported problems with DNS errors after upgrading to 10.5 something to do with the network not being available before directory services cache goes looking for addresses. Open up terminal and run this command "dscacheutil -flushcache" to flush the cache. (its only a temp fix)

If you have not already tried it, google OpenDNS and try that. Lots of people swear by it, there DNS servers certainly seem to be quicker than Virgin's.

Finally, search http://www.macfixitforums.com there is lots of info on there.

 

[Sergeant Pluck]

It can't be broken, it's probably working perfectly, it's just Mac's do things in a cool, creative and chilled out way dude. Kick back and let it do it's thing man. It might get there slower, but it'll get there better - it's a Mac.

 

[(RIP) Tunneruk]

I think you misunderstood my post.
The issue that Cookie is having sounds like why I got rid of the Mac. It eventually became slower at almost everything and almost unusable for internet surfing. It wouldn't do any sort of video and couldn't be upgraded or improved any further and there where many compatibility issues that were getting me down. Perhaps someone more computer savvy than myself could have tweaked a bit more life out of it, but ultimately it was just outdated.

Please accept my humblest Mr. Monkey. Just read it in the right context

All computers get old and out of date. If I'd come on this forum 3 years ago and said that most of the machines in PC World would be running 'Dual Core' processors, have 2GB of ram and would in the main be under £500 most people would fall off their chairs.

Yes I have a Mac and I genuinely would never go back to PC, Yes I have the occasional glitch which 90% of the time is induced my me. There are 2500 threads in the Computer help section of this forum and I'm willing to bet that only 1% of them relate to problems with Mac (I have a Mac thread in there myself)

Somebody posts a thread about Mac and all the long suffering PC owners can finally taste a little victory over us smug Mac owners ..... well if it gets it off you're chest and all that.

Incidently My Mac is quick as you like this morning....... It just works!

 

[President Palmer]

DNS Issus

A lot of people get confused by DNS and regardless of your platform (either PC or MAC) the protocol is exactly the same.

Is your settings on your mac you should select DHCP to obtain a IP automatically from your router. This allows you to setup the DHCP parameters in one place.

Log on to your router and usually the LAN setting and enable DHCP.

You will need to set the IP start range say 192.168.1.100, the default Gateway (which is usually the router itself) and DNS information.

As DNS is recursive you can set the first DNS record to the ISP root DNS server which is usually displayed when you view router stats. ISP DNS information is obtained when your router connects to your ISP and obtains a IP address.

Other reasons for Computers slowing down is disk defragmentation, IO anti-virus scanners (which should be avoided) and any other memory resident app stealing processor cycles.

To be honest when you computers gets so slow the only fix is a vanilla rebuild (which is drastic I know but resets everything back factory defaults before you cocked it all up).

 

[cookie]

Dont know if you have solved this yet, but a couple of things:

There was a trojan horse fairly recently affecting DNS addresses by exploiting a weakness in Quicktime, this should have been fixed with a patch by now. Have you dowloaded any codecs lately? If so this may be the problem.

Some people have reported problems with DNS errors after upgrading to 10.5 something to do with the network not being available before directory services cache goes looking for addresses. Open up terminal and run this command "dscacheutil -flushcache" to flush the cache. (its only a temp fix)

If you have not already tried it, google OpenDNS and try that. Lots of people swear by it, there DNS servers certainly seem to be quicker than Virgin's.

Finally, search http://www.macfixitforums.com there is lots of info on there.

the only codecs i've put on the mac are Flip4mac to play wmp files (bbc news site) in quicktime. that didn't appear to work so i downloaded VLC player, which plays just about anything.

incidentally, Flip4mac started working after a reboot, something SMOs (Smug Mac Owners) tell you is only needed on crappy windows machines

when i added another DNS server, other PCs on my LAN stopped being recognised. how can i avoid that?

 

[ianf]

Your router may well be learning the name to address translation for your local network, my bthomehub does. Name resolution will work if your router is the DNS.

When you point DNS to the internet those computers won't be visible by name, as your local network is private.

Good point to remember for the future, opendns etc won't be able to resolve for a local lan.

I guess adding:-
opendns1 addr
opendns2 addr
local router addr

would probably get around it and give the best of both worlds.

 

[cookie]

I guess adding:-
opendns1 addr
opendns2 addr
local router addr

would probably get around it and give the best of both worlds.

adding in that order?

i had it with my router at the top, didn't see a way of moving it as it was greyed out, so i just added underneath.

router is NAT.

 

[shugie]

adding in that order?

i had it with my router at the top, didn't see a way of moving it as it was greyed out, so i just added underneath.

router is NAT.

If the router address is greyed out I suspect that the mac, and the pcs, are using DHCP to get IP info from the router. To stop this you will need to set manual IP addresses in the mac and the pcs, and turn dhcp off in the router. Or put an exclusion range in the DCHP config in the route to set aside a few addresses for manual configuration, and then manually configure the mac.

The mac can also do DHCP I believe, and I've had them upsetting windows network browsing before now.

 

[ianf]

Hmm. I'll have to try it later at home. You can see how name resolution is working with the terminal, to see if your named pc/printers are reachable:-

ians-macbook:~ ian$ nslookup news.bbc.co.uk
Server: 164.xxx.xxx.xxx
Address: 164.xxx.xxx.xxx#53

Non-authoritative answer:
news.bbc.co.uk canonical name = newswww.bbc.net.uk.
Name: newswww.bbc.net.uk
Address: 212.58.226.79

ians-macbook:~ ian$

i.e. i got served by DNS 164.xxx.xxx.xxx (at work) and it thinks news.bbc.co.uk is at 212.58.226.79.

ians-macbook:~ ian$ nslookup ians-macbook
;; Got SERVFAIL reply from 164.xxx.xxx.xxx, trying next server
Server: 134.xxx.xxx.xxx
Address: 134.xxx.xxx.xxx#53

** server can't find ians-macbook: SERVFAIL

ians-macbook:~ ian$

My local address is unregistered in either company DNS. This would be the case you'd see for your other named pc devices if nothing in your list resolved it. I'll test this at home later to see if the homehub is learning.

 

[cookie]

If the router address is greyed out I suspect that the mac, and the pcs, are using DHCP to get IP info from the router. To stop this you will need to set manual IP addresses in the mac and the pcs, and turn dhcp off in the router. Or put an exclusion range in the DCHP config in the route to set aside a few addresses for manual configuration, and then manually configure the mac.

The mac can also do DHCP I believe, and I've had them upsetting windows network browsing before now.

next time you're down then

 

[shugie]

next time you're down then

sounds like a good excuse to disappear for a bit to me.

 

[Dahoum]

Smug Mac owners will get exactly what's coming to them

The bubble is about to be well and truly popped

What you got planned Bill??

(Oh - and my G5, Powerbook and Mac Mini are just fine cookie - I use Safari on the two smaller machines and Firefox on the G5 - no probs at all recently )

 

[ianf]

I just checked... The router may well be able to provide lan side name resolution, the btopenworld router calls this domain .home for example:-

ians-macbook:~ ian$ nslookup ians-macbook
Server: 192.168.1.254
Address: 192.168.1.254#53

Name: ians-macbook.home
Address: 192.168.1.64

So that's likely why adding public DNS broke your local resolution.

You are right though, if DHCP is on, then the one supplied by that is grey and top of the list. Still if the nslookup (or the call from the program) fails on the router or the ISP DNS it'll fall back to openDNS etc.

 

[Deleted Member I]

You've broken it .. that's what is wrong