I installed a 16Mbps Comcast business broadband service about two weeks ago. Since then, I noticed my MacBook Pro's WIFI speed drops down to only 100Kbps almost all the time. It's only good for a very short period of time after I restart router, blindly changed some setting on my MacBook Pro or router.
There were many times I thought the problem got resolved, I even posted a BLOG to celebrate it :). But after a few more minutes, the problem always comes back! My hair got almost pulled out completely and my mind became crazy!
Finally from last night, I noticed ping time in my network was very unreliable:
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1757 ttl=64 time=0.933 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1758 ttl=64 time=1095.138 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1759 ttl=64 time=102.211 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1760 ttl=64 time=1451.482 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1761 ttl=64 time=467.000 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1762 ttl=64 time=1859.467 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1763 ttl=64 time=861.624 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=1764 ttl=64 time=1.828 ms
I started thinking maybe I should try close all application one at a time and see if any of them had any impact on the thing.
So I left a terminal open, with ping running, so I could see change of ping speed. At the same time, I started to close applications I run, such as Adium, Skype, Firefox... Wait! after Firefox was close, the ping speed turned back to a normal range:
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=453 ttl=64 time=2.267 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=454 ttl=64 time=1.001 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=455 ttl=64 time=1.004 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=456 ttl=64 time=0.987 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=457 ttl=64 time=1.197 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=458 ttl=64 time=1.008 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.0.5: icmp_seq=459 ttl=64 time=1.245 ms
It got be Firefox!
Then another question comes back. Why did Firefox behave pretty good before? And I cannot live without it.
That's when I realized I installed GoogleGear to enable offline access to my gmail account almost the same time when I installed Comcast. Could that plugin be a problem? Easy to know. I removed this plugin. And everything is back to normal, even with Firefox running! I enabled/disabled it many times just to confirm. And looks like IT WAS GOOGLEGEAR THAT CAUSED ALL MY HAIR-LOSS!
I will report the problem to our google friend. In the mean time, in case you are losing your hair as I was. Hope this post helps.
Li
1 comment:
Hi Li!
After noticing the unstable pings, another parallel troubleshooting path would have been run a sniffer packet capture (Like wireshark), to see how much bandwidth is being used and for what type of communication, and if HTTP, to which site (Gmail?)
I've been using google gears to speed up my wordpress management console without any problems.
I don't know too much about the offline GMail feature, but I could speculate that perhaps gears is downloading a lot of content from your inbox.
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