Kind of going crazy here trying to figure out what's going on with my internet. My internet speed test show that everything is fine and running at great speeds, and I don't have any problems downloading from steam, playing games online, or even watching videos from an app. But every single internet browser is dragging horribly slow. Youtube takes forever to load a video and when it does, it plays it at 144p. I can change setting to 1080p and sometimes it just won't load, or it will take some time but eventually play at that quality. Reddit loads incredibly slow, and a lot of other pages I have to refresh multiple times to get them to open. I'm currently trying to download a zip file that I need via a website and it just stays at either 1% or 0%. I haven't had any issues downloading files from my email.
So far I've tried a few things and I'm worried I'm getting into territory where I'll do more harm than good. I've cleared my browser caches, uninstalled and reinstalled the browsers, I've logged out of my VPN (should I uninstall it?), ran a virus/malware scan (ESET scanner) and found 1 issue which I deleted. I'm not sure where to go from here. I thought I could disable IPv6 but from what I can tell that won't actually solve the root cause of the issue. I considered reinstalling my network adapters but I'm pretty sure that would be a really bad idea as I don't really know what I'm doing in that regard. Can anyone give me any other ideas to troubleshoot or what I can try before I do something stupid?
Edit: clearing the DNS cache seems to have resolved the issue so hopefully it doesn't happen again.
Source: r/techsupport · by /u/ChesterComics