A lot of people, including us, have been getting really slow download speeds on the OS X El Capitan, or macOS Sierra, download. Chances are, the servers nearest to you are being seriously hammered, hence the slow download.
An easy fix to this is to change your DNS to either use OpenDNS or a free DNS from the land down under (Australia)
Go to System Preferences > Network > Advanced > DNS remove any existing DNS entries and add either of the following:
208.67.222.222 #OpenDNS # We've had success with the one above, the following DNS worked for some but was down when we tried it, give either one a shot to see which one works for you. 203.122.233.11
Pause your download, give it a minute and then restart it.
Bandwidth consumption jumped to almost completely consume the connection we had immediately.
Dear god thank you so much! There’re advices to change the DNS server all over the internet, but this is the first one that actually worked for me.
This one did the trick! Dropped my download time from 2 days to 1 hour. Thank you!
Hey man, thanks you, dropped from 1day and 5h to 43 min.
apparently the European DNS Server would eventually return a EU download-site. That could be the reason.
It is way faster for me now… Thank you
Oh dude, this is working great, from 2 days to 1 hour 30 min. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much! This worked like a charm. Appreciate it!
thank you so much! from 1 day to an hour with the first DNS!!!
This is the answer, finally! Been waiting for almost a week to find the proper DNS. Thank you!
I just reformatted my drive, so I don’t have Preferences to go to. Any other suggestions?
Try adding the DNS entries to the dhcp area on your router so your computer automatically fetches them when it connects to the network
It was a fresh install on a newly-formatted drive. Those components were not available for edit. Managed to finish in less than 30 hours. 🙁
Meanwhile, Apple still says this problem doesn’t exist.
Don’t forget to click ‘Apply’. Works great. I added both DNS and speed went from 1 day to 30 min.
(Update for July 2016) Thank you, the OpenDNS above worked for me. (208.67.222.222) The other one must’ve borked after being hammered from being spread on Reddit and everywhere else.
sorry but my download speed still slow as usual.its so stressful..i am using macbook pro mid 2010..i keep changing my dns and still this happen..i already check my download speed at speedtest and its 20mb per sec..so please help me solving thiss :,(
try these: http://www.getflix.com.au/setup/overview
i had try it out but its still slow..i am from malaysia and i just using dns locate at malaysia and still it slow..would u prefer to me which country dns should i use
The DNS entries I shared were from Australia, I’d recommend you search for DNS servers for different countries, that might help you. downloading the update via a VPN might also help