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I've been working on trying to get my Mac up to speed on the net, and am experiencing some very strange results.

First of all, webpages load slow on my Mac. Speedtest says

          Mac OS X 10.5   Windows 7
Ping      116ms           200ms
Download  0.83mb/s        5.81mb/s
Upload    0.61mb/s        0.51mb/s

I'm running synergy with the Mac as the server, no problem with the speed of synergy I also run skype on the Mac, and have no problem with full video on skype.

I've set my DNS to OpenDNS as that was what all the message boards say to do, but that hasn't helped.

Of course, I've restarted the Mac, turned airport on and off, as well as turned off synergy and skype and re-run the tests, but nothing works.

Airport has full bars. The computers are right next to each other, so signal is all the same. I don't have access to the base-station unfortunately.

My DNS servers are set to 208.67.222.222 abd 208.67.220.220

IPv6 is off.

I've just done a Ping test with macs network utility here are the results

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 71.636/74.071/78.114/1.890 ms

Looks good to me, but internet download speed is terrible.

This is a fairly new occurance, the mac in question was working at full speed originally.

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Are they connected to a router (if yes, which one)? Any special software running on the Mac, like Antivirus or Firewalls? – Bobby Nov 1 '09 at 22:10
the computers are connected to the base-station via wifi. It is included in my rent and is somewhere in the building, which is why I don't really have access to it. I don't know what it is. The mac does not have any Antivirus or Firewalls. – user7926 Nov 2 '09 at 17:40
1  
Even if it helps, then OpenDNS will only make the initial connection faster. Once downloading (once your computer knows which IP address to use for some domain name) then using OpenDNS does not matter at all. – Arjan Nov 2 '09 at 18:13
(Consider changing the title to something like: "Why is downloading on my Mac seven times slower than on my PC?") – Arjan Nov 2 '09 at 18:16
If you create and login to a new user account does the problem persist? – Hasaan Chop Nov 15 '09 at 18:54

4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Are they both using the same wireless connection type (A,B,G,N, etc)?

Also, the antenna in the mac could be not as good... try moving around your apartment to see if the the signal strength has a large effect. Lower signal means less bandwidth typically.

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signal strength isn't a problem. I had the mac in question working at full speed at one point (I'll edit my question to reflect that). – user7926 Nov 2 '09 at 23:49
as far as A,B,G,N goes, both the windows and the mac in question are N capable. And windows shows it is using radio 802.11n, and network utility on mac says I am n is available (though I can't figure out where to it says what radio it is actually using. – user7926 Nov 3 '09 at 0:05
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Did you open the necessary ports for Skype under System Options - Sharing?

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skype works! that is the strange part. I get full video, no problems both ways. I changed the skpe port to 50000 anyway, but that didn't make any difference. – user7926 Nov 2 '09 at 17:38
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Could it be that you just have your wireless connection on a Mac force-limited to 1MBps? Check wireless connection options/settings to find out.

Also, could you try a different browser? (Just in case the browser is the culprit.)

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up vote 0 down vote

I have personal experience with this, and it's simply that the Mac wireless sucks.

In my office right now, I'm copying data from a customer's hard drive to a network server that only I have access to. Copying from the airport on the Mac (it's an HFS+ drive), it copies about 2GB/h. Copying from the ethernet NIC on the Mac is about 5GB/h. On my Windows 7 PC with HFSExplorer installed, I can copy data to the same server (again, by itself only) at about 10GB/h. Exact same data, from the same drive.

When copying on the Mac, I am using the Terminal. When copying on the PC, I'm using the external program, HFSExplorer

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