Safari is Slow with TimeWarner RoadRunner

Question

I don't normally post on these boards (this is my first time), but since someone else's post has helped me, I thought I would return the favor. First, some info...
My Computer: MacBook running Leopard OS 10.5.2
My Internet Service Provider: Time Warner/RoadRunner
My Problem: For the last few weeks, my page loads using Safari have been very slow. I would click on a link -- the page would begin loading -- the page would quit loading -- the blue progress bar would stop -- and then the bar would shoot ahead -- and the page would finish loading. This normally took anywhere from a few seconds to 45 seconds.
My Failed Solutions (not necessarily in the order I tried them):
1. I reset Safari. No improvement.
2. I called Apple Support. They recommended deleting some files from the "Library" folder. I did this and there was no improvement. There have been some other posts on this site that have recommended the same solution.
3. I removed and reinstalled Safari. No improvement.
4. I plugged my MacBook directly into my router via ethernet (thus taking it off my home wireless network). No improvement.
5. I tried using Safari on another wireless network (probably also using RoadRunner). No improvement.
6. I installed Firefox. It was no faster.
And then I saw the post below:
"Sometime around midnight on February 26th (at least for the SoCal users), TimeWarner's RoadRunner service started intercepting failed DNS requests, redirecting them to RoadRunner's own search and advertising platform. To see if this has been enabled in your area, try visiting {some random string}.com in your Web browser. This feature subverts user preferences set within browsers, which allow the user to select which search engine receives their typos and invalid domains."
I was not really certain what all that meant, but I entered something like www.1dfjdks4903.com into Safari and a RoadRunner page appeared. I had seen it a few times before recently, but never paid any attention to it. Then I saw this post:
"Would you by chance be using Roadrunner as your ISP. I noticed DNS queries took longer than usual after they started intercepting domain typos. I got fed up with it, and pointed my DNS settings to opendns.org. That solved the problem. My guess, is that your ISP is the one that's causing the problem."
Again, I didn't really know what all that meant (DNS?), but I went to www.opendns.org; hit the "Get Started" link; selected "Router"; and followed the directions.
Problem solved. My Safari is performing as well as it did before I started having problems and maybe even better! If you have already tried some of the solutions above, and nothing improves, you might want to try this if you are with Time Warner. It worked for me.
Anyway, I hope this post helps anyone out there who was as frustrated as I was a few days ago. And to the Mac users who put the above posts up that helped me, THANKS!

Answer 1

I wish you had posted this a week ago, when I spent several days on the phone with Time Warner and had several of their support people out to try to fix this. What I've learned: most of their tech support doesn't even know about their new domain redirection feature yet, and the people they send out don't want to hear about it. They'd rather reset/replace your modem, blame your router or computer...In my case they seriously told me all our computers (we have 6!) were broken. I'm not kidding!
From what I figured out myself, their system causes major havoc. I've had it redirect perfectly valid domain names (no typos), probably because my Internet connection became so unbearably slow and timed out? Don't know for sure, since Time Warner doesn't want to find out. I took screenshots of a page being redirected at 10:01 a.m. and loading perfectly fine at 10:02 a.m. I have screenshots of it telling me google.com and weather.com don't exist. I've showed all this to the technicians by they don't want to admit there's a problem. Someone suggested switching to open DNS as a solution. I may just switch ISPs as my solution.