Mac OS X 10.6.6 Upgrade and slow Internet?
 

I did the easy upgrade to version 10.6.6 of OS X and then spent a good part of yesterday trying to figure out why my sites were loading so slowly. Eventually I realized it wasn't just my sites (which was a relief for a few minutes) and then spent a lot of time trying to find out why everything was loading so slowly.

I did the usual things like running Disk Utility several times after the upgrade (always do that) and then booted into Safe Mode and ran it again. Then booted into Single-User mode and ran fsck from the command line. But didn't see any improvements.

After searching the various Mac boards this morning I found one suggestion that immediately resulted in faster browsing and loading times, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else runs into the slowdown problem.

I connect to a cable modem via an AirPort Wi-Fi connection, so this fix may not apply if you connect via Ethernet or some other mode. But if you use an AirPort Base Station or AirPort Express, the fix I found was to simply switch to a different Airport channel. I'm not sure why that worked, but I'm guessing it also resets some other things and that made the difference.

If you're not sure how to do this, here are the steps to take:

Make sure you know your AirPort Base Station password (find it in your Keychain if you saved it there).

Open the AirPort Utility program (found in Applications/Utilities).

Select the AirPort Base Station or AirPort Express you want to manage in the column on the left.

Click Manual Setup (enter your password if needed)

Click AirPort in the Toolbar and then click Wireless in the selections below the Toolbar.

In the Channel popup menu choose a different channel that whatever you've been using (you can see what you're using in the Summary screen).

Enter your wireless network password twice.

Click the Update button and wait for your Airport Base Station to be reset.

Quit the AirPort Utility program.

See if surfing and loading is faster now.


-- Hope that helps.

I would think you shouldn't have problems with any channel since you shouldn't have too many base stations in your immediate area.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4459

I don't even see anything related to wireless except this security fix: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4298 and I don't see anything speed or channel related there.

The only thing I can think is that coincidentally someone installed a new 802.11n router near you or something else odd happened. Do you have the channel set to a fixed number or Automatic? With automatic, it should actually shift if it detects cross-traffic.

I haven't seen this issue but I also have a channel selected that one that none of my neighbor's are using.

I agree that I shouldn't have had any problems with any channel. I did have it set to Automatic selection of a new channel (I also use Interference Robustness with an 11 Mbps Multicast Rate), and I've never had a problem like this until the 10.6.6 update.

If you search for "os x 10.6.6 slow internet" you'll see that others were having the same and similar problems (for example long/slow startup times). The suggestion to change the channel and reset the base station was something I found posted on the Apple discussion forum in reply to someone posting about the problem and the person who'd had a similar slowdown posted that it worked for them.

As I mentioned, I'm not sure why this worked but my Net access time is noticeably faster than it's ever been now. My guess is that changing the channel and then resetting the AirPort Base Station does something else too. Not sure what or why, but the results were better than I hoped for.

:)

heh, I bet I know.... :)

In your TCP/IP settings, what is IPv6 set to? Automatic? or Disabled?

My setting is...

Configure IPv6: Automatically

My thought is that the new update enabled ipv6 on the airport, you were given an ipv6 address on your lan, and whoever provides DNS service may be handing you ipv6 addresses - but, you cannot route ipv6 from home, so, your DNS queries took time to timeout and fallback to ipv4.

perhaps.

Yeah, that kind of makes sense, or at least it could be a reasonable explanation.

Perhaps.

;)

Thanks much for that post Simon. Same problems here. Going to go through your steps now.
My PC wireless is having all kinds of problems too. I use Cox cable, called them because there new TV commercial say's just one number for all customer needs. Called it and out of service. After hours of trying to get live customer support, the guy had no clue on how to help. I asked him if he works at Cox and he said, "NO, I'm just a student in college right now".