Mac OS X 10.3.7: General Network slowness

Severe, overall network slow-downs for a number of systems upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3.7 can cause an array of other problems including slow startup for network-enabled applications and slow startup for Mac OS X itself.

MacFixIt reader Ulf Cronenberg found that changing the format of his local IP address assignment fixed the issue:

"My router - a Draytek Vigor 2900 - had the IP 192.168.1.1. You only have to change it e.g. into 10.0.1.1 and after that Mail, OmniWeb and iChat opens as quick as before. It seems that Mac OS X 10.3.7 has problems with routers using the IPs 192.168.1.x."

Jon confirms the previously reported workaround of manually entering DNS server addresses:

"Typically I left my Location set to 'Automatic' and things would just work between home and office with my AirPort card. After updating my 1.25GHz Aluminum PowerBook to 10.3.7, I experienced dreadful slowness on DNS lookups. But only in the office. While at work, connecting to a Buffalo wireless router, it would often take 5 seconds to do one DNS lookup. [...]I ended up creating a "Work" location and hard assigned the DNS numbers. This sped things up a bit but once I switched from DHCP to Manual and hard assigned all numbers, things are just a fast as they were before the upgrade."

Reader "Lyman's" experiences are actually the opposite of Joe's in terms of how he was able to improve Internet performance after installing the update:

"I discovered something useful that may work for others frustrated with slow online performance after upgrading to OS 10.3.7. If you also use a router, something seems to have changed regarding the use of manual DNS addresses. Prior to the upgrade, I had DNS Servers entered manually, per advice of my ISP, Earthlink, in both the router and in Network Preferences. (Configured IPv4 using DHCP). Now the reverse is true. As an experiment, I created a new Location in Network Prefs. All original settings were re-copied exactly, except that I did not enter anything in the DNS Servers box. (The DNS addresses were left unchanged in the router, however). Instantly Safari, Mail, and Firefox became plenty snappy. The solution was as simple as that. Now it appears having redundant addresses is a liability. Making a new Location alone may have done the trick, or just deleting DNS Servers may have provided the cure. Doing both certainly worked great."

Charles Elliott found that turning off all of his equipment, waiting a few minutes, then turning it all back on resulted in elimination of the network lag:

"Upgraded through Software Update. First couple of starts were very slow but this has improved. Had the same trouble many are having with slow internet apps- slow to launch, didn't seem to be working. I turned off Airport, shut the computer down, powered off my Airport Base Station (graphite), cable modem, and LinkSys router for a few minutes, restarted the modem, router and Airport, and rebooted the PowerBook. No more internet or network problems."

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