Few Issues (websites + mac related).

[Fragil1ty]

So the more important one really, I'm a web developer/designer and work for a small photographic company and I've made them a website, yada yada yada.

Long story short, I come home yesterday from work and during work the website I work on was accessible etc and when I got home, I was testing out changes that I had made and for some weird reason the website is not accessible and every time I try to access it, it just times me out.

I can use cmd to ping to it fine and get a quick/timely response, but I can't actually load up the website. I've tried everything apart from resetting the router? any ideas?

-----------

As for the Mac issue, I'm updated the latest O/S (Mavericks) and installed all of the latest patches/updates and whatever.
I've got a late-2013 MBP and for some weird reason, even when I don't seem to be having a lot of applications running, it seems to lagg and be a bit sluggish, like for example if I were to open a few apps such as:

Safari, Mail, Sublime, Textedit and perhaps Photoshop it would start to lagg, which I thought was odd as it shouldn't be using up that much space, so I thought I'd check the activity monitor etc and to cut a long story short, the amount of memory that was been used was barely past 2GB it was around 2.1-2.3gb of total usage.

I read up and found out that it 'may be' because of the way Mavericks handles memory now, but it's just annoying.

So short of me buying 8GB of RAM for this machine, is there anything I can do?

Thanks for any replies that come my way.

[heedpantsnow]

So you are pinging the server, but have you checked permissions of index.html or whatever the front page is?

I'm not sure I understand your RAM issue, how much physical RAM do you have?

[Fragil1ty]

So you are pinging the server, but have you checked permissions of index.html or whatever the front page is?

I'm not sure I understand your RAM issue, how much physical RAM do you have?

I'm pinging the website, so for example: ping -t www.website.co.uk and I get a response, I can get access to it through a vpn, so obviously there has to be a problem on my end, I'm just not sure what that problem is at the moment, :/

I have 4GB of Physical RAM, no matter the apps I'm using it says I am using 3.99GB of RAM and I'm getting lagg etc, but I did the calculations myself and the above listed apps in use should have only equalled 2.3gb, so tl;dr - computer is being laggy and using more ram than it should be, any ideas on how to fix.

[heedpantsnow]

If you have an SSD then is it almost full?  That can cause studdering.

[Fragil1ty]

If you have an SSD then is it almost full?  That can cause studdering.

Nah man, got a HDD and it's got 400GB+ free, so it can't be that.

[heedpantsnow]

OK.  The last thing I can suggest about the Mac issue is to repair permissions.  Often that fixes weird issues that seem to have no other explanation.

Quit all programs (not just close the window, but select "Quit" or "Exit" from the File menu.  Exit as many as possible from the top task bar.

Go to Disk Utility, select the drive of your OS, and click "Repair Permissions" at the bottom.  Go get a cup of coffee, because it will probably take a while.

Restart your Mac.  Hopefully this will have fixed your issues.  If not, I'm at a loss and you should probably take it to an Apple store.  Good luck!

[Lanx]

use a different browser, i don't know the "technical term" but sometimes a browser just remembers/resolves the address funny.
i mean you do have chrome/firefox/opera/ie installed right? that should be all standard. once you know you can at least load it on a different browser, then it really is that weird resolving issues (usually fixes itself after 2hours in my experience)

[Wildcard]

ok so have you validated that you can reach the website from another computer on your network?

edit: it actually sounds like a stale DNS issue. I'm not sure what the response was you were seeing from ping. Since you can access the website through VPN you're probably connecting to the web server through a different route then you would be from your home network. Example (internal private address vs. external public facing address).

[Wildcard]

use a different browser, i don't know the "technical term" but sometimes a browser just remembers/resolves the address funny.
i mean you do have chrome/firefox/opera/ie installed right? that should be all standard. once you know you can at least load it on a different browser, then it really is that weird resolving issues (usually fixes itself after 2hours in my experience)

Stale DNS entries can cause this.

Enter this into a terminal window:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Then, to reload DNS type this

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

You could also try rebooting your Mac if you haven't done that in awhile.

[dorkvader]

use a different browser, i don't know the "technical term" but sometimes a browser just remembers/resolves the address funny.
i mean you do have chrome/firefox/opera/ie installed right? that should be all standard. once you know you can at least load it on a different browser, then it really is that weird resolving issues (usually fixes itself after 2hours in my experience)

Stale DNS entries can cause this.

Enter this into a terminal window:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Then, to reload DNS type this

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

You could also try rebooting your Mac if you haven't done that in awhile.

^ this.

You can also sometimes test for DNS issues by temporarily changing to a different DNS server / service. Google's public DNS 8.8.8.8 is easy to remember. Also try using a "is this website up" service, or just post the URL here and all of GH will go visit it to see what's up.

As far as RAM usage: your best bet is to switch to linux. I recommend SliTaZ if you are having RAM usage issues: it is very lightweight.

If you're dead set on ruining such good hardware with OSX, you can take a look at what's using the most amount of RAM, check for things that can cause a memory leak, and certainly restart it / reset PRAM/SMC while you're there. If the issue persists when you are NOT using all your RAM, repairing permissions may help.

[smknjoe]

It could be a browser routing issue or it could be that you need to clear out any old cached versions of the site. I didn't see anyone mention that. If it's a DNS routing issue outside of the browser settings then you probably wouldn't be able to ping it using the URL only the IP would work.

Someone mentioned a reboot. Good idea...