Delay in fetching web pages

rationull

Registered
Fairly frequently (but not every time) when I try to visit a web site, my browser starts contacting the server and fetching the page, but hangs for a while instead of bringing the page up. If I stop and reload, the page comes up quickly. The browser itself doesn't hang, the UI still responds, but downloading the page hangs. It's as if some packets are being dropped and a timeout is being waited for or something.

I have a fast broadband connection, so it's not a speed problem. I'm connecting over Airport. It happens in Safari, as well as Firefox and Opera. It's intermittent, but it seems to happen very frequently with certain sites (gmail, for instance), or when I first try to access a web site after not accessing the internet for a few minutes (it's kind of hard to tell specifically what makes it more frequent).

I'm running AcidSearch and PithHelmet, but even with PithHelmet disabled it still happens, and it happens with browsers other than Safari so I don't think that has anything to do with it. This does not happen on any of the windows computers in the house, so I don't believe it's a problem with my internet connection or router.

I am able to keep connections open to a VPN and remote desktop servers, so I don't think the computer has trouble keeping connections alive, it's just making new ones.

The computer is a Powerbook G4 12" 1.5 Ghz, 1.26 GB of RAM, running 10.4.3, fully up to date.

Does this sound like a known problem? Hardware or software?
 
It sounds as if you are having some kind of Cache problem. However the first thing to do is delete the AcidSearch. I have personally found that plugin played badly with my surfing and since removing it, all the small problems went away. Second is to download a program called TinkerTool and in the Safari tweaks disable the Internet Cache function. See if that helps.
 
Sometimes banner ads will do this to a web page. IF the server that the banner ad is on is busy or unavailable, the whole page can stall waiting for that one image.

Open Safari's Activity Viewer and see if there's a specific image or something that's causing the delay.
 
I deleted AcidSearch just to be on the safe side.

I don't believe it's a problem with a banner ad, as gmail.google.com does not display any, and even if it did they would certainly be from google itself and probably not delay the page load.

I also do not believe it's a caching problem -- after posting I fired up Ethereal on my pb and one of my windows machines and tried to access gmail. It looks like the PB isn't getting DNS query responses from my router, while the other machines are. I tried to turn on Interference Robustness but it made no difference.

Also, I just found that it does not happen on my ethernet connection at work, so I'm guessing it's either a problem with my router or with my AirPort card/drivers. I'll test it again on a different wireless connection when I can, and I'll try the caching trick when I get home.
 
I'm actually experiencing the same problem on all of the Macs on my office's network. Same exact symptom (lags, but loads quickly if you press stop & reload). Unlike your problem, tho, all of our macs ARE connected via ethernet. If you happen on a solution, I'll be glad to hear it and try it out.
 
Again: Open Activity Viewer in Safari and see where it hangs. Before getting ANYthing? Then it's DNS-related. Some specific image or something? Then it might be server-related.

Besides, when I enter www.gmail.com, the browser is redirected about three times before showing the "Loading..." page (which probably means yet another redirection!) which would explain the delay pretty easily, as Safari (or any other browser) has to get the IP for the given domains everytime (they change from gmail.com to mail.google.com, for example).
 
Going by Safari's activity viewer as well as further probing with Ethereal it's definitely a DNS problem. On one network I'm not getting any DNS responses at all, and now on a different wireless network I'm getting DNS failure packets and eventually Safari comes back with a "page not found" error. If I VPN to my work network and then try to load the page it works just fine. Testing earlier at work, I did not have this problem.

It seems like it could be some kind of bad interaction between the mac and certain routers' DNS servers maybe? This is definitely not being caused by page redirects, as I would notice that in the Ethereal packet trace.
 
I too am getting this, while I am answering the Mac OS X page has still not completely loading in Safari.

This is very strange, I have the DNS servers hard coded into the manually configred TCP/IP. It may be an issue with regard to loading but it has just started to happen after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4.4
 
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