Very slow web browsing

AJB


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I have experienced a marked decline in the speed of my 4 months old 24" 2.8 Intel iMac with 2G memory, when downloading web pages.

I connect wirelessly (due to absence of phone socket in room) to a Draytek Vigor router, and this is the only Mac using the router generally.

The router is showing the following broadband statistics:

DSL Status Mode State Up Speed Down Speed SNR Margin Loop Att.
G.DMT SHOWTIME 448000 6112000 10.0 22.5

This seems OK and suggests it is not an ISP or router issue?

Signal strength is usually full as the router is in the next room. I am running 11g only, security is on but SSID is not hidden.

Any advice to help me return to rapid download speeds would be much appreciated.
 
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My first advice would be to power off the router, let it sit for ten minutes or so and then power it back on.

I do not have the same router, but I do notice that whenever the web seems to be slowing down, this usually cures it. Remember that your router is itself a computer system. Like any computer, it benefits from being restarted now and then. It just sort of cleans things up.

Try this and report back.
 
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AJB


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Hi Mac57. I have tried the router re-start - it is part of my problem solving routine. Switch off, power off at wall, wait and re-start both iMac and router. This does not result in a cure (although it is very useful if the signal strength dies).

I have also checked activity monitor, obviously, and CPU is not being stretched. Nothing else is slow on the iMac.

I can make it MUCH worse if I run Aperture, but that application is very processor hungry at times, especially when uploading images to my web site. However, I have Aperture off most of the time.
 
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Also make sure you have all the latest software updates. At least 1 other forum member has reported improved network performance with 10.5.3

mrplow
 
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AJB


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I am running 10.5.3 and software is updated every week.
 
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Is it the same whether you use Safari or Firefox?
 
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OK, I think we can rule out the router. Assuming nothing else is running and you are still having these issues, how about the obvious things:

1/ Use the Safari, Reset Safari menu item to clear out all of Safari's caches
2/ Use the Safari, Empty Cache menu item just to be sure
3/ Get and run OnyX - run all of the maintenance scripts and then reboot

Alexis has a good question. Is it the same with Firefox? If you don't have Firefox, it might be worth getting it just to try this out.

Also, what version of Safari are you running? You should be up to 3.1.1 at this point.
 
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One other thought comes to mind. Check your Login Items (System Preferences, Accounts, your_user_id, Login Items).

What else is running on the machine by default? You mention that you have 2GB of RAM, so there should be plenty, but the fact that you can make the situation much worse by running a memory hog like Aperture suggests that you are running low on RAM. This makes me wonder what ELSE might be consuming your RAM?

If you don't have the excellent freeware Menu Meters you should get it, install it and enable both the CPU monitoring and the memory monitoring. That way you can keep an eye on these critical resources at all time to be sure that they are not being hogged.

Finally, how much disk space do you have left? Could it be that your Mac is just starting to thrash due to low disk space?
 
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...and one last thing. Related to my ruminations of memory (above) this thread concerns itself with excessive memory usage by Safari. An interesting side note to this conversation about Safari performance.
 

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