Takes forever to find server

After the computer has been idle for a while, and we go to check mail for instance or open yahoo (or other sites), it will frequently say "can't find server", with repeated tries, I will finally open the window, so we know the interenet connection is OK. The updated OS is installed. Anyone have any ideas?

Hi there johncoutts,
You may find the troubleshooting steps in the article below helpful.
OS X Mail: Troubleshooting sending and receiving email messages
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3276
-Griff W.

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GPS takes forever to find 'current location'

Whenever i load up maps and use the 'current lcoation' button, it literally takes forever to find it and also for the GPS to actually work, both when connected via 3G and Wi-Fi, as well as EDGE.
Anyone else having the problem? Might it just be a **** 3G coverage in my area?

All GPS's typically can take several minutes to latch on to satellite signals.
That's why phones use A-GPS, to speed up the time to first fix.
The iPhone uses combos of GPS, cel towers and wi-fi routers, and so may take a bit longer to decide the best combo for your current location.
Cell id < 1 sec... WiFi < 1 sec... A-GPS should be < 5 secs, but can be up to 20-30 secs on ATT.
A-GPS is new to ATT, which traditionally used tower triangulation, so perhaps assistance servers aren't online yet in many areas, or are unavailable on 3G. (EDGE and 3G use different assistance protocols... RRLP vs RRC)
Obviously it would be helpful if ATT and/or Apple would speak up and tell us what's going on, how it's supposed to work, and give some tips.

MacBook Pro Retina takes forever to find a wifi network and connect to it.

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Trying to move files to trash takes forever, and finder windows take forever to load files/apps

after recently installing Mackeeper (yes, I know..) and attempting to uninstall, my macbook pro 13" al. is taking forever to move a file to the trash, and it equally takes forever to open a finder window. running 10.6.8.

MacKeeper is an exception to the rule that system modifications should be uninstalled according to the developer's instructions. Although not generally recognized as such, MacKeeper is in fact a trojan, because the developer distributes an uninstaller that purports to delete it, but leaves behind something that causes popup ads to appear in the user’s web browser. Try following the instructions here:
how to uninstall MacKeeper « Phil Stokes
I can't personally vouch for the accuracy of those instructions, but others seem to have had success with them.

Airport takes forever to find my router only after lid has been closed

My macbook only started having this problem about a month ago. Whenever I close the laptop and it goes to sleep, then open it, it takes a few minutes for it to go from "Searching" to "Scanning" to actually choosing my network, and even then it doesn't always go to my preferred network automatically. It didn't used to do this and it seems to only happen when I close the laptop. When I leave the computer to go to sleep on its own without closing it, then hit a button to wake it again, the wifi network is still connected.
This problem is really only annoying because of the time it takes to find my network. But I'm also curious because it never used to do this and I'm not sure why it's doing it only on my computer. My girlfriend's older iBook G4 finds a network in about 1 second.
does anyone know why this might be happening and what I could do to fix it?
Thanks.

Try this:
1) Go to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration and delete com.apple.airport.preferences.plist. You will need admin privileges to do this.
2) Start System Preferences/Network > Airport
- Click on Advanced, and AirPort tab
- Remove ALL the names in the Preferred Networks list (even the one for the network you use)
- Click on OK
- Now add the network you usually use by clicking on + and (re) entering its details (including password).
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Good luck
Bob

Finder taking forever to find files

Just upgraded to OS10.5 a couple of weeks ago. When I'm searching (cmd F) for files on one of our external drives it takes forever to find them. I can go and find them manually sometimes faster than the computer can find them. I can also find files pretty quickly on any of our servers, but the external drive is alot slower. I usually start the search and move on to another job and then go back after about 5 minutes to retrieve the files that it has found. I'm not using Spotlight, I've never understood the purpose of that, it doesn't find what I need at all. Why is the finder sooooo slow in this OS version?

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Logging in Calendar Server sometimes takes forever

Test setup :
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- Sun ONE Calendar Server (5.1.1),
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- Distant auth LDAP database : OpenLDAP
Just after restarting the services, login procedure works OK and fast. After a few hours of use, login procedure takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds (but finally works).
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It's possible that you are having a problem with some Firefox add-on that is hindering your Firefox's normal behavior. Have you tried disabling all add-ons (just to check), to see if Firefox goes back to normal?
Whenever you have a problem with Firefox, whatever it is, you should make sure it's not caused by one (or more than one) of your installed add-ons, be it an extension, a theme or a plugin. To do that easily and cleanly, run Firefox in [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe+Mode safe mode] (don't forget to select ''Disable all add-ons'' when you start safe mode). If the problem disappears, you know it's from an add-on. Disable them all in normal mode, and enable them one at a time until you find the source of the problem. See [http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes this article] for information about troubleshooting extensions and themes and [https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Troubleshooting+plugins this one] for plugins.
If you need support for one of your add-ons, you'll have to contact its author.
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Attaching files from Safari and FF- Finder window takes forever to pop up

Hi everyone,
I'm having a strange problem with my Finder. When I am in Safari or FF (Using 10.6.3) and I click the button to select a file to upload on any website, it take the finder window about 20-30 seconds to pop up. This happens every time I want to navigate to select a file. I get the spinning beach ball and the Finder window finally pops up generally 20 seconds later. I checked this in another user account on my machine and it has the same problem. I don't think it's a Safari or FF problem, as it's doing it in both browsers---anyone have any idea why it would take forever for the Finder selection window to pop up?

HI and Welcome to Apple Discussions...
Go to ~/Library/Preferences and move the com.apple.finder.plist file to the Trash and restart your Mac.
The tilde "~" character represents your home folder.
Since the problem happens in more then account I'm not sure if trashing the .plist file will help but won't hurt to try.
From the Safari Menu Bar, click Safari / Empty Cache. When you are done with that...
From the Safari Menu Bar, click Safari / Reset Safari. Select the top 5 buttons and click Reset.
Go here for trouble shooting 3rd party plugins or input managers which might be causing the problem. Safari: Add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues
anyone have any idea why it would take forever for the Finder selection window to pop up?
Try repairing disk permissions...
Quit any open applications/programs. Launch Disk Utility. (Applications/Utilities) Select MacintoshHD in the panel on the left, select the FirstAid tab. Click: Repair Disk Permissions. When it's finished from the Menu Bar, Quit Disk Utility and restart your Mac. If you see a long list of "messages" in the permissions window, it's ok. That can be ignored. As long as you see, "Permissions Repair Complete" when it's finished... you're done. Quit Disk Utility and *restart your Mac.*
Carolyn

Why does Spotlight find things immediately but Finder takes forever?

Can someone explain why you type in something in Spotlight and poof it's there immediately but the Finder takes forever and a day?

By "Finder", you mean Command-F in the Finder? That is just a different interface for Spotlight -- it uses the same index. There is no reason why it would ever be less up-to-date then a Spotlight menu search. As for speed of the search, I cannot reproduce your experience. A Command-F Finder search usually finds what I am looking for before I can finish typing the keyword. I am on Leopard now, where Spotlight is stunningly fast. But I fired up my Blue&White G3 a little while ago and confirmed that, even there, a Finder search is much faster than my clumsy typing.

Opening documents from server takes forever

If I Lion users creates a document on the server in say something like TextEdit then reopens TextEdit later they are greated to a spinning beach ball while TextEdit tries to resume editing that previous document from the server. I dont want to turn off autoresume since they like being able to log out and return to where they left off when they log back in. But man watching that beach ball spin is painful and takes forever.

Anyone else seeing this. If you have a network user just open a TextEdit document from an AFP share and see if it beachballs TextEdit when the document opens.
Originally I thought it was the auto-resume feature so I turned that off but I am still seeing the beachballing with apps like TextEdit, Quicktime, and Preview. So I am led to believe it has something to do with the new auto-save/versioning feature that is having issues with files stored on network sharepoints.

Facebook won't load properly. Takes forever and then I get a script page with log-in and then that takes forever and gives me further script that won't let me access anything. Other sites load and work OK!

Started after last auto update several days ago. A few other sites are slow to load while many are good but Facebook just won't present it's usual mix of pre-programmed scripts and links but comes up eventually as part HTML script with a log-in box and when you log-in it then takes forever again and just gives HTML type script for "Friends" "messages" etc. but if you click these it goes nowhere!
Also it won't let me clear history at all despite many tries. I removed and reloaded the program last night but no positive effect.

I still haven't resolved this problem. Here is some more information...
youtube is the only website that has started working, but it sometimes stops working again.
There are many other sites that don't work, cnn.com, washingtonpost.com (sometimes), and a lot of others.
I have contacted our internet service provider and they said that they had nothing to do with the problem.
Some websites will not work at all. Safari tells me that it can't find the server. Some that do this are ups.com, computerworld.com, and others.
I think that the problem is that, for some reason, our mac computers can't access certain servers where we are. (We are at a small ski resort (on the mountain) in Canada.) I think this because when a site doesn't load properly there are several errors and they are all "can't find host" errors from a couple of the same sites (ex. example.something.something).
*Also, I ran a test on speedtest.net on the laptop and one of our iMacs and the results were way faster than anything actually loads/downloads or than the activity monitor shows, even when checking the activity monitor at the same time as running the test.

Copying files on NFS shares takes forever. Any suggestions?

I have some shares mounted via NFS, using Lion as a client. The mounting used to work flawlessly under Snow Leopard. In Lion, copying files often takes forever - the little spinning ball appears and it may take up to several minutes to complete a copy operation. The problem appears to be unrelated from the Finder - I have noticed the same when using the terminal to copy files.
Are there perhaps some different settings I should use when mounting the NFS shares?

Hi,
You may try this:
Click Start> Control Panel> Internet Options.
Click Security tab.
Click Local Intranet.
Click Sites button.
Click Advanced button.
Enter the IP Address of the other machine or server and click Add.
Click Close.
Also, review this article:
How to bypass the
security warning "Unknown Publisher" with the checkbox "Always Ask Before Opening this File"
Tracy Cai
TechNet Community Support

SpotLight takes forever to index

I know there are a few questions with this title, but they are really about SpotLight taking forever to prepare the indexing. In my case, it takes forever to index. It starts, get a few pixels' worth of the progress bar done, and then stops forever. I've left my computer on for hours on end hoping SoptLight will eventually finish its job; it doesn't. (By the way, it also doesn't give me an estimated remaining time; I just get the progress bar.)
I'm running Mavericks (10.9.5) on a MacBook Pro from September 2014; my computer runs on a 2.2-GHz i7 processor and has 16 GB of RAM. I've got about 420 GB of data (recovered from a TimeMachine backup) split up as follows: about 200 GB is in the computer's 250-GB internal flash-memory "hard disk", and the rest of it is in an external SeaGate 2-TB drive.
For the sake of my battery (which is eaten up ridiculously quickly by SpotLight), I've turned indexing off with the terminal command sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist. However, I do want the indexing to get done so I can actually search my Mac for stuff. I've already run into one instance of the computer being unable to find a document which I know is there (I think it was in the SeaGate drive, but it was looking everywhere, not just in the internal disk); I don't want that to happen again. So how do I get the indexing to actually get done? (Oh, I have a STRONG preference for solutions which don't involve installing third-party software.)
I'd never had this problem before, and I've restored data from TimeMachine backups in the past.
Thanks in advance for any help.

Thanks for your reply, Linc Davis.
The first terminal command resulted in the following (not knowing whether they are privacy-related or not, I replaced the hex codes after MDSImporterProxy with Xs):
Oct 4 17:25:46 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
Oct 5 12:14:16 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
Oct 5 18:20:28 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
Oct 6 08:27:29 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
Oct 6 19:48:33 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
Oct 7 09:23:53 (Error) ImportServer: <MDSImporterProxy 0xXXXXXXXXXXXX shutdown:NO got shutdown notification:NO> still waiting for plug-in info from bundle finder
The second terminal command resulted in the following:
Spotlight server is disabled.
I therefore reactivated SpotLight indexing (with the same command as in my original post, only replacing unload with load), after which I immediately reran the second terminal command. I got the following:
Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning
/Volumes/SeaGate:
Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning
I then waited a few seconds so SpotLight would start "indexing" and ran the comman a third time, this time getting the following:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/SeaGate:
Indexing enabled.
In the console, under "Diagnostic and usage information", there are three sections: "Diagnostic and usage messages", "User diagnostic reports" and "System diagnostic reports". I wasn't sure which of these I should look under, so I selected each of them and searched for "spotlight" (searching for either "mdworker" or ".crash" produced 4 or 5 results, all unrelated to SpotLight, and searching for "mds" returned no results). Only the first section, "Diagnostic and usage messages", had results. At first there was a single result, which I am quoting below (again, I replaced the UUID with Xs); after I turned SpotLight indexing off again (using the command on my original post), I got a second message which was identical to the one below but had no date and had the then-current time. (Note that 10.07 is the date in the format I specified in the system prefs and 11:31:47.238 is, I suppose, the time in Apple's preferred format.)
10.07 11:31:47.238 SystemUIServer[185]: com.apple.message.domain: com.apple.batterymenuextra.signature
com.apple.message.signature: com.apple.metadata.Spotlight
com.apple.message.summarize: YES
Sender_Mach_UUID: XXXXXX

Can't Find Server at... error -- only one site, works from non-Macs fine

Greetings:
I have been getting a "Can't Find Server at www.teocommunications.com" error in Firefox for over a month now. I thought initially that it was a problem with the DNS entries and maybe the record had not proliferated though the DNS servers of my ISP or something of that nature. This is not the case.
I have tried to bring my site up in Safari and it yields the same result.
Did an nslookup, and everything resolves fine. Every once in awhile the site comes up on my Mac, but most of the time it gives the error. At all times, if you try to go to it from a Windows machine or my smart phone it works fine 100% if the time. My wife's Windows Vista machine with Firefox brings it up fine 100% of the time (she is on the very same network). I can get it to work for some reason if I totally reboot the Mac or reset the router (but the router is obviously not the problem)... it has to be something in the Mac OS (10.6 and 10.5) that is going on. I have eliminated all other possible problems. Curiously enough, it seems to also be a Leopard (not just Snow Leopard) issue... I can reproduce the error at my school (which is on a totally different network than my home) on the Mac Pro Intels they have which are still on Leopard.
I am on the latest version of Snow Leopard on a brand new Mac Mini.
This problem is only with my site (that I know of) but again it happens ONLY on Macs with Leopard or Snow Leopard. I am very annoyed by this problem and because it is my professional work site, it is imperative that I find the solution and soon.
Hope someone can help.
APPLE, please look into possible configuration or DNS issues in Leopard/Snow Leopard, as before I posted here, I did try several 'fixes' for issues like this for Firefox before I noticed that Safari was getting the same issue and ANY OTHER PLATFORM sees my page just fine!

Hi Guys:
It sometimes works from my Mac as well. I can get it to load if I reboot the Mac and then in a few reloads it is back to the same error.
I did try openDNS as well and it did not still load. I can pretty much guarantee that it is not the DNS records, it is something going on between my Mac (or the Pros at school). Other sites from my same host work fine, my domain is setup exactly the same. They do use ISPConfig... and it could be something with that program, but I can not seem to confirm any problems there.
I reset my router and the site is currently loading again on my Mac, but I can tell you it will be throwing the error in the very near future because that is one fix that worked before and it worked exactly two loads when I switched to a different wireless access point that is not my router.
SO, the fact that it loads one to up to twenty times on someone's Mac is not enough to reproduce the problem. It takes several reloads and then the problem magically re-appears. This is why the fact that it is working right now on my machine is not good enough to call it fixed.
Try to reload my site several times and see if it gives you the error.
I have (as I stated) tried a lot of what is being suggested here and re-tried it, but nothing fixes it for very long
I appreciate the help and hopefully we can figure out why the situation exists.
Thanks for the help so far and please feel free to keep suggesting ideas, but for reference I have tried:
1. modifying settings in Firefox (although it does not matter what browser I use,the result is always the same)
2. resetting the router and DSL modem
3. modifying the /etc/hosts file on my Mac
4. dscacheutil -flushcache
5. using openDNS instead of my ISP (which is AT&T)
6. removing the DNS settings and using the router settings
7. turning off airport and back on after 30 seconds
8. renewing my DHCP clients
9. Signning onto a different wireless access point (which is actually a new ISP that I am going with and so they are a totally different network and subnet).. they are setup all over town with wireless access. -- pretty cool actually.
None of this seems to fix the problem loading only my site. Since I do have access to the hosting provider (I work with them)... I have done some things on the hosting side too. All to no avail.

Firefox takes forever to open/startup. How can I fix this?

I am running Windows XP. All updates are current. IE opens up fast, but Firefox takes forever. Also, it is using way too much memory. Please advise.

A possible cause is security software (firewall) that blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.
Remove all rules for Firefox from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.
See:
*https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Server+not+found
*https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Firewalls
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.<br />
See "Basic Troubleshooting: Make a new profile":
*https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Basic+Troubleshooting#w_8-make-a-new-profile
There may be extensions and plugins installed by default in a new profile, so check that in "Tools > Add-ons > Extensions & Plugins" in case there are still problems.
If that new profile works then you can transfer some files from the old profile to that new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.
See:
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

Takes forever to find server

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