Why is Google Chrome having trouble connecting to Google's servers?

Question

When I bring my Macbook to work I often experience really long response times (~60 seconds) when I use google.com / the unified search bar (or whatever it's name is...). When I'm at home or when I use Safari or Firefox everything works fast. I also experience this problem on websites using Google's CDN or API's. My colleagues are having the same issues... It's really annoying when you want to look something up fast. I temporarily switched to DuckDuckGo, but that isn't a solution.

Does anybody know how I can fix this problem? What steps can I follow to find the cause?

Answer 1

It seemed the problem was related to the NSS-SSL library or the SPDY protocol Chrome is using. I have followed the steps that were described by Jamie Starke on this page and now I'm able to use the Google service at normal speed in Chrome!

Windows

• Right click on the short-cut you’re using to start Chrome

• Select Properties Modify Target from

  • ...\chrome.exe"

    into

  • ...\chrome.exe" --use-spdy=off --use-system-ssl

    (note: the command line arguments have to go after the quotation marks)

• Click Apply

• Close all Chrome windows
• Restart Chrome

Mac

• Open the terminal (In your Applications -> Utilities folder)

• Type into terminal to change to Chrome’s Directory using:

  cd /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS

• Rename Google Chrome to Chrome in the terminal:

  mv Google\ Chrome Chrome Copy the following 3 lines for the contents of our execution script:

   #!/bin/sh
   # This will execute your Google Chrome with SPDY disabled, and set it to use your System SSL 
   /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Chrome --use-spdy=off --use-system-ssl 
  

• Type the following into the Terminal to make a file from what you just copied:

  pbpaste > Google\ Chrome

• Type the following into the terminal to it so our new Google Chrome can run: chmod +x Google\ Chrome
• Close Google Chrome using the Apple menu, or Command-Q:
• Restart Google Chrome

Answer 2

Does your network at work or the network at home have IPv6 enabled?

It sounds like one of them does, and IPv6 connectivity is either not working properly or your laptop is caching the DNS results and trying to use IPv6 in the wrong situation.

A couple of steps to figure this out: + check if any of your network cards have an IPv6 address associated with them (not starting with fe80). + if that's the case do a dig -t aaaa google.com and see if it returns a result + perform ping6 google.com and see if you get a reply.

If you do have a proper IPv6 address, and the last two steps fail, something is wrong, and it should be fixed. Temporarily disabling IPv6 would be a quick solution.