Many websites I am visiting seem slow today, taking 60-80 seconds of wall clock time to load. Ouch. Yet a quick visit to DSLreports.com reveals:
3947Kbps into my house seems to be pretty good, how does that compare with other results out there; it has been a while since I tested. I am really happy with 54ms latency, which seems to be a more pertinent result. So the basic pipe does not seem to be the problem, I’ll have to dig a bit more to find out why page load times are slow.
Update: This has now been solved, it is a slow DNS response over WiFi networks problem. I am not sure why WiFi makes simple DNS requests slow, but I measure ~1 second responses to initial dig requests via WiFi, and ~150 milliseconds via ethernet. So I set up a caching DNS server on my laptop, which in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is trivially easy:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist sudo launchctl start org.isc.named
In Tiger or Panther you’ll need some more UNIX skills, but it is not very difficult to set up a caching name server on any flavor of Mac OS X. Vastly faster web browsing now!
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Funny thing is I get a much different set of results when I use DSL reports and when I use speedtest.net.
Though Speedtest.net seems to give me the answer that reflects the service I should be receiving.
DSL Reports seems to give me far less!
Check yours through speedtest.net
DSL Reports – 4476, 1237, 19ms Latency
Speedtest.net – 9021, 1837, 57 ms Ping response
Speedtest.net rates me at:
15427 kbps down, 925 kbps up, 54ms latency
Interestingly, that was from my house to DC.
The earlier test from DSL reports was to Chicago.
Today, DSL lets me test to New York, and that is in line with Speedtest.net:
14655 kbps down, 933 kbps up, 40ms latency
The web slowness persists, but it is not with the basic pipe. Trying to figure out if it’s DNS or something else.
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[...] Web Browsing over Wireless Computers, Personal | Almost two months ago I wrote and started investigating why web browsing on my MacBook Air was sluggish. Well, I tried a few things, and then had to focus on other issues and put that problem aside for a [...]
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