[winky]

Earlier in the week my page loading started to crawl at a snails pace. I have spoken with my provider who confirmed it is not access speed. DSL reports confirms his comments. I have run a virus scan as well as spyware software. Both were negative. It almost seems as if a program I cannot see is running in the background, thus consuming bandwidth. Is there a way to determine my suspicion?

TIA

[JoshuaZ]

I'm feeling the same thing here. Nothing has changed but the OS. Oddddd.

[AppleOptionFour]

Winky,

Are you using a theme or something designed by someone else on your page?

The reason I ask is because those sometime make calls back to the original website of the designer; so called phoning home. If this is the case, and the other web site is REALLY slow, yours will slow too.

I use wordpress with a theme that did this, and it took me hours to diagnose the problem. Look in your page source and see if anything other than your own domain shows up.

[winky]

I cleared whatever themes I was using. Does not seem to make much difference. I looked at page source but nothing jumped out at me. Any other ideas?

[nunofgs]

It could be the same airport problem I am having.

I posted my findings on an apple discussions page here.

[amazing]

here's some standard network/broadband troubleshooting options:
1. reboot your DSL/cable modem and WAP and computer
2. if you're using wireless, use iStumbler etc to review your wireless neighborhood, particularly to see if a neighbor has added a WAP on your same wireless channel
3. someone nearby might have added a new wireless telephone on the same frequency
4. check the firmware on your modem and WAP
5. if wireless, hookup the same computer via ethernet and compare the speed, which will narrow it down to a wireless problem (or not) if that's the way you're connecting.

[winky]

I am connected through a router to my ethernet port. Thanks for the wireless info. Any other ideas?

[winky]

Worked the problem out myself. The issue was that there was a DNS setting in the DNS box for Ethernet preferences. Cleared the DNS value, saved the settings and I am back as fast as I ever was. Thanks to everyone for their help and recommendations.

[Cold Warrior]

sometimes those DNS entries can be useful, if you have a fast DNS server, such as OpenDNS. They're free and their lookups are very fast. OpenDNS | Providing A Safer And Faster Internet

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

[winky]

Wow! Great tip. Speed picked up tremendously.

Gotta love this board and its users. Kudos.

[Kenstee]

My DNS fields are grayed out (with the numbers in them) and I can't delete them. How do I get around this?

[Cold Warrior]

you need to unlock them. Somewhere in the window should be a lock icon. Click it and enter your password.

[ghporter]

It's useful to have an objective measure of your speed when you're happy with it, so that you can tell if things just "seem slower" or they really are.

Speedtest.net is a great choice for this. Note your upload and download speeds, compare them to your broadband package's "up to" speeds and get a feel for your actual speed. At any point if it feels like you're dragging, just check your speed again.

One final note. DSL and cable differ in one major area: cable requires no authentication, while DSL uses the PPPoE protocol to identify a user as legitimate (in almost all DSL settings, anyway). This protocol takes up at least 8 bytes from every data packet, so your MTU setting needs to be adjusted. Your Mac should automatically handle this on its end, but your router probably won't. With a DSL connection, go into your router's setup and change the MTU from the default 1500 to 1492 and then check your speed. If this setting is wrong, a DSL connection will measure at about half of its rated speed. Fix it, and you'll fly.