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Possibly the wrong solution
Authored by: TipMeOver on May 05, '05 11:00:10AM

I'm not an expert on this or anything but I was having the same problem on my Mac too. I figured it had to be the DNS server causing the problem because it took forever to connect to the site, but once it did, it would download the whole page very fast (unless the page referenced another domain for a graphic or something). Then after that the page would load quickly unless i waited a long time, then it would do it again. So I figured it cached it locally for a certain time and then it you didn't use it for a while, it would drop it from the cache.

This was a problem with all browsers and i was able to reproduce it with ping as well. I figured it must have been a problem with the ISP's domain server because it wasn't a problem all along, but just started happening all of a sudden. So the big suprise came when i tried it on my PC and it wasn't slow at all. (it had a good 10-20 second delay on my mac)

So I searched the net and was having trouble finding anything on this problem but I did find a thread somewhere in which someone had the problem come and go in certain builds of OSX and found that when he was having the problem in a particular build, he could fix it by just specifying the IP of the DNS server to use. I tried it and it worked perfectly.

Apparently, the problem is an intermittent bug in OSX where it doesn't properly retrieve the DNS server automatically when you are using DHCP to autodetect the DNS server from the ISP. My guess is that it gets an invalid address, tries it first, times-out, and then tries the secondary DNS server which works.

I have Verizon DSL, as did the other people I read about that had the problem. If you have verizon, you can go to verizon's web site and find the IP of the DNS server to use in your state. I'm sure other ISP's will provide this info as well.

You just have to get the IP address and go to the TCP/IP settings and specify the DNS server instead of having it auto detect.



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Possibly the wrong solution
Authored by: foamy on May 05, '05 12:10:07PM

Same here with SBC DSL.

I noticed that all of a sudden lookups took forever and browsing was painful.

I called SBC and of course the woman in India had no idea what I was talking about, but she did find my local DNS IP addresses. Added those and it has worked fine ever since.



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