Mac Mini’s Internet connection is very slow, every other device’s connection is fine. (PC, iPhone, Xbox 360)

Question

I recently haven’t used my Mac Mini for about 5 days (however it was left on).

I seem to be able to connect and get great download / upload speeds through my PC, Xbox 360, iPhone and parents’ laptop.

However, my Mac Mini is very slow.

Mac OS X’s Mail.app is downloading mail at 0.4kbps and then dropping to 0. Skype file transfers are doing the same. Browsing the net is a terrible experience. It is taking 30 seconds or more to download basic pages.

All of my devices connect wirelessly to a Netgear router / modem.

I have tried giving the Mac Mini a manual IP, and renew DHCP lease, as well as flush DNS in Terminal.

I have also rebooted the router / modem twice, and the Mac Mini twice.

Do you know what could be causing this? Thanks

This is very weird. It is also very slow accessing localhost (setup through MAMP) and also slow to access the Netgear router config pages.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I changed the settings of the WiFi channel to "auto" and – guess what – all fine and dandy now.

Answer 2

My mac mini was having slow wifi issues as well. After reading that the issue is sometimes caused by bluetooth, I disconnected my old, Microsoft wireless (but not bluetooth) mouse and the problem instantly went away.

Answer 3

Look in activity monitor and see if anything is chewing up resources. Perhaps you have a runaway process pegging your NIC that you're unaware of.

I know this is probably a stupid question, but you're not running anything like NetLimiter are you?

Answer 4

Have you tested with a wired connection? That may rule out whether the AirPort device on your MacMini is flaky or not.

Additionally, you could play with the MTU and duplex settings under the "Ethernet" tab inside the advanced network preferences for the selected network interface.

Answer 5

I had a slow connection to localhost on one of my gentoo machines once before. The problem was because of my poor attempt to configure my firewall. You can test if this is the source of your problem by temporarily disabling your firewall on your mac-mini to see if that fixes the problem.

Answer 6

I was having the same problem with my MacBook and this is what I've discovered.

There are some apps on the Mac that interfere with the network such as VMWare, Parallels, Virtual Box. They add hidden network interfaces and this causes your Airport to degrade in performance.

I've been able to replicate the same issue on a Mac mini.

I've tested with Parallels and VMWare. Parallels appears to make the issue come to the surface faster.

Only solution is reboot OR remove the virtual network interfaces.

BTW: Activity Monitor is located un the Utilities folder. Type Activity Monitor in Spotlight to find it fast!

Answer 7

I had a verizon router MI424WR-GEN2 was on 'Legacy Mode' changed to 'Performance Mode' all worked fine after.

Go into Wireless Settings > Advanced Settings > scroll down to the Wireless mode and change it

'Compatibility Mode' 802.11b/g & 802.11n'
'Legacy Mode' 802.11b/g'
'Performance Mode 802.11n' <---------

Answer 8

I have had the "slow" wireless issue for the last few days. I was only getting 5.5 mbit/sec on the wlan connection. I could not even browse the internet for troubleshooting advice at that speed.

The problem turned out to be that I moved the mac mini about 12 inches a few days ago. In the new location it was close to a 10-slot usb3 hub and 3 external usb harddrives, an external SSD, and 1 flash drive. I moved the mac mini back to where it was a week ago and my wlan speed immediately jumped to 144 mbit/sec!