Mac running slow behind router, full speed when not behind it.

OK, not really a apple notebook but maybe someone knows the answer. I'm helping my father in law. He has a Apple G5 computer and a HP Vista computer. Both are behind a Dlink Router. All was fine up to about 6 weeks back. PC is OK. The Apple (running OSX 10.4) when loading a page with Safari, Firefox, or IE will pause for a long time before finishing loading the page. Example: www.foodnetwork.com. I hit enter. It loads most of the page, then the green update bar pauses for like 30seconds then maybe it'll startup and finish loading. PC is fine. If I remove the router, the mac works at full speed. The moment I put it back behind the router, it slows down. I swapped out the router with mine from my house. Same thing, it slow behind the router. Its running CAT5. Same cable for direct and behind router, so its not the cable.
I tell him his OS might be corrupted. So he upgrades to OSX (10.5). After a clean install and installation of all the updates we try the browser. SAME THING. Augh.

Anything?

I did the following fairly quick so I might have done it wrong, but I tried cloning his mac to the router. No difference. I tried putting the mac on teh DMZ on the router. Still no difference.

 

No clue really...You could always try things such as disabling IPv6 and renewing your DHCP lease in System Pref>Network>Advanced. Might also want to try changing some options under the Ethernet tab. What are the Transfer Statistics in Network Utility (/Applications/Utilities/)?

 

I have used almost every router but dlink. I've had Zyxel, linksys, netgear, and now I'm using a Time Capsule as my router. I've never noticed a difference between the speed my windows boxes, linux boxes and macs would get. I've had static ip's and dhcp. No difference. Most recently, I changed from plain wep to wpa and the only device that couldn't come along was an older hp printer. No surprise really as HP is rather clueless wrt developing software. I also use switches. Most routers come with built-in switches. My Time Capsule has a built-in gigabit switch and I also have an 8 port gigabit switch for the rest of the wired portion of my network.

On my network data passes mostly betwen the 'net and the macs but there is also data going to the Time Capsule for backups as well as to wifi and wired printers and network attached storage. Switches tend to try to "learn" where data should go. Moving a wire from one port to another was no big deal on a hub but on a switch, it can lead to delays as the switch relearns what data should go to which port.



If you go to an Apple genius, chances are their knee-jerk reaction will be to get a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme Base Station. There is some merit to this argument. I haven't gone through 5 routers for no reason. What they claim to do on the outside of the box is often not true. The linksys failed to provide filtering and was resetting itself and losing connectivity several times a week. The zyxel was wired only and I replaced it to get wifi. The Netgear was fairly stable but lost it's mind about every 60 days. It claimed to have firewall and filtering features that flat out did not work and caused mysterious and difficult to diagnose issues like the inability to to photobucket. Lastly, the Time Capsule doesn't make the grandiose claims the others made and does the little it claims to do very well. To date, I have had no resets and no dropouts. The only down side is the inability to manage it without special software (no web interface). But the Airport software is so well designed I don't mind one bit. The time capsule includes a 4 port gigabit switch and I have an 8 port gigabit switch. This means I can have 10 wired devices between the TC and the switch and virtually unlimited wireless devices (I think the limit is advertised as 50).

Here is my setup:
internet<==>TimeCapsule
TimeCapsule<==>switch/macs/printers/nas(wired)
switch<==>macs/printers/nas (wired)
TimeCapsule<- - ->macs/printers (wireless)

Here are a couple of things to try before you consider replacing the dlink router. Since we are talking about 'net speeds here we are really talking about everything sub 100baseT. Get a 100baseT HUB (not a switch) and connect it as follows:

internet<===>dlink<==>HUB
HUB<==>pc
HUB<==>mac

If you can find one these days when switches have become so commonplace, A hub should only cost about $15-20. If everything is the same speed with this setup, leave well enough alone and keep using it. If this doesn't solve your problem, look for settings in the router. One thing to turn off is "stateful packet inspection". It's a firewall feature that requires that each and every packet is examined for malicious content. Nice concept but most home routers botch this concept so badly so as to make it useless. Why would the SPI setting affect OS X and not Vista? Perhaps there is software running on OS X that triggers this but nothing you are using on Vista is affected by it. One example is tunnelling software. If you use VPN, it wreaks havoc with SPI. I don't know if Apple uses any VPN technology for dot mac but that could be the culprit.

hope this helps...

 

Oh speed is FINE. As far as speed tests are concerned. It just STOPS when loading a page. Like if a java app or flash app was trying to load or a item on the page is waiting to be loaded. After a while, it'll continue on the page load. It is weird. This is on two different routers. His and mine.

 

OT. Speaking of time capsule. He has a My Book 1TB. He wants to use that for time machine feature. But he has data on it. It's asking him to formate the drive. Does it really need to? Also, if he does, is there a way to make two partitions and just make a partition that matches his main harddrive size (150gb) and use the other partition to store pictures and things? Example: One 150gb and 850GB partition? Or does Time Machine require more space and/or the whole drive to itself?

 

No hub. I had a switch somewhere tho. I'll try looking for the things you mentioned.

 

This is strange. Stalling during a page load could be related to the way the javascript is being handled. What browser are you using? If you have firefox with noscipt/adblock on windows(sort of a standard minimum setup these days) but safari without any adblock add-ons that could be the difference. Stall during page load is often caused because doubleclick.net or another ad server is taking too long sending the advertising banners. This is one reason I have all that crap shut down.

Time machine really doesn't like dos / fat / ntfs formatted target disks. Perhaps this is related to file metadata that can't easily be stored on those file systems like it could on HFS. I went ahead and wiped my 500 gig mybook when asked to do so by time machine. The reformat in HFS was surprisingly fast. You can partition the usb drive if you want to. Time machine does not require it's own partition. It simply requires a HFS partition. Once you've started using a disk for time machine, you can also use it to store files. Here's the rub. Time machine will continue storing weekly full backups until the drive fills up. This is the main reason to consider partitioning. I have a 500 gig Time Capsule and a 500 gig mybook. I plan to put the 500 gig mybook on the time capsule usb port and use it for network file storage (NAS).

I took a look at my (mounted) Time Capsule partition and I can navigate to individual files. I suspect this works better if the source and target file systems are alike, hence the requirement to format those dos-formatted usb drives in HFS (Mac) format. I went over the network and took a look at the time capsule shared drive and each of the 3 macs I have being backed up there has a "sparsebundle" file there. Inside each of these sparsebundle "packages" are all our files. I'll take a look later using "show package contents" but not right now as time machine is churning away at the moment.

 

I tried to turn off is "stateful packet inspection". No difference. Oh and I did reset my router to factory. And still same issue.

 

If SPI didn't cause the problem, it's ok to turn it back on but don't forget about trying it again if you have trouble connecting to a particular service.

So you have tried:
1) net--cablemodem--router--mac and pc
and:
2) net--cablemodem--mac

and 1 is always slow. With and without SPI, 1 is always slow. Is your mac using dhcp or a "reserved" ip address? When you switch to option 1 and back to option 2, do you have to power cycle the cable modem to get an ip? (just curious as Comcast always insists on power cycling the cable modem).

Peculiar...

Darn Peculiar...

Have you tried:
3) net--cablemodem--router--mac only

It's not supposed to be any different but if it does, that might shed some light on this.

I assume everything is wired and nothing is wireless. One thing that's worth trying is swapping cables. If the slow 'net follows a certain cable, maybe that cable is bad. Sometimes noise on ethernet makes all the difference. I assume the pc is 100bt and the mac is 1000bt running in 100bt mode. Can you take a look at what speeds you get using speedtest.net? In setups 1 and 2 (and possibly 3) use speedtest.net and note any long "page loads" while the test is setting up. You will have to enable flash to run the tests. Both machines should see the same speeds and both should take less than a minute to run. Normally, I would say pick the local "recommended" server but if you are seeing a ping higher than 150, pick the closest major city ie chicago or new york. Run all tests against the same server and note the differences.

Here is mine. The first one is the "recommended server" and at 580+ ping is a little wierd so I'll go back and try chicago...


This is the worst my connection has been lately. Chigago ping is 600+. Wierd...


So I decided to be silly and use San Francisco and got the best ping yet. 200+. Still high but it's faster to go further.


Internet weather changes faster than outdoor weather. Now I'm back to the recommended server and finally getting a normal ping