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Many times when I am browsing the web, Snow Leopard will sit and load a site for 20 seconds or more, until it times out and says it cannot be displayed. If I refresh while it is originally loading, it will NOT load the page. If I wait until it times out then click refresh, it loads RIGHT away, every time. The issue is intermittent but happens from once every couple of days to a few times a day.

So the long and short of it is this:

  • Aluminum MacBook (Non-Pro) 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 4GB DDR3
  • I am using 10.6.6 but I have had this issue since 10.6.0
  • It happens in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari
  • I have flushed my DNS (using the command 'blablabla flush')
  • I am using custom DNS servers which I hoped would fix it but it had no effect*
  • I am running Apache currently but haven't been for most of the time
  • I've reformatted multiple times, always experiencing the issue
  • I am on Cox cable internet, with a Motorola Surfboard & a Belkin F6D4230-4 v1 (Pre?) N wireless router.
  • I've put the router in G only & N only & G+N to no effect
  • It seems to be domain dependant as I can sometimes load the Google cache right away, and sometimes other sites will load but Google will refuse
  • My Powerbook G4 with Leopard, other Windows XP laptops, & my wired Win7 desktop do not suffer from the issue.
  • I've turned off IPv6 by going to SysPrefs->Networking->Advanced->TCP/IP and setting Configure IPv6 to off

*I recently started using these to escape the awful Cox redirect page on timeouts

I'm almost positive the issue has happened on other networks but I can't recall a specific instance (I have a terrible memory). The problem is intermittent and fixable enough (I just have to wait until it times out and hit refresh one time) but incredibly annoying since I'm constantly reading documentation from a large variety of sites.

EDIT: To clarify, this happens with ALL sites, not only specific sites. I haven't been able to detect any pattern to the failures, but one day Google.com will refuse to load while reddit.com will, and the next day vice versa.

Keep in mind that waiting for a timeout and hitting refresh loads the page right away, every time. If I don't wait for the timeout, opening more links, hitting refresh, and clicking the link a billion times have no effect.

It seems to be domain neutral, affecting sites seemingly at random. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with connection inactivity either, because I will be SSHed into different servers, uploading files, browsing, downloading, etc, and it will just quit loading Jquery.com (for example) until I sit and wait for a timeout. /EDIT

EDIT: I have already had IPv6 disabled (both Airport & Ethernet, although I'm using Airport) since I tried to fix it myself a while ago. So that's a dead end. :(

This is my last resort. Please, someone, tell me what is happening.

Thank you.

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  • Can you reproduce it? I.e. is there a specific domain that has this issue repeatedly? Does it also appear on Linux and/or Windows (if you have a Windows copy, try installing it via Boot Camp)? Does it happen for all your user accounts (create a new one and browse with it).
    – Daniel Beck ♦
    Feb 15, 2011 at 13:51
  • I cannot reproduce it since once the site loads, it loads quickly for a while. It seems to be non-specific to any domain, affecting them arbitrarily (from my point of view). I will try a bootable Linux distro but I won't install Windows. If it works correctly in Windows/Linux (as I suspect it would), what would be your recommendation?
    – Brandon
    Feb 21, 2011 at 21:53

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I had the same problem. But I found I had to change my ethernet settings. Configure to manually... speed to autoselect... MTU to custom at 1492.

Try that!

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I would also try disabling IPv6 on the Mac in System Preferences>Network>(Interface)>Advanced. Mac OS X has issues with DNS stalling when a AAAA record is available as it will prioritize IPv6 over IPv4. As Cox Cable does support 6to4 auto configuration it maybe that your machine is fetching AAAA records and is having tunneling issues and just never falling back to IPv4. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/05/04/2029255/Mac-OS-X-Problem-Puts-Up-a-Block-To-IPv6

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  • I forgot to mention I did this already. I went to SysPrefs->Networking->Advanced->TCP/IP and set Configure IP to Off. If there is another, more thorough way to get rid of IPv6 please post it here and I'll try it.
    – Brandon
    Feb 21, 2011 at 21:55

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