But if Apple’s support forums and the Interwebs are an indication, the level of annoyance with the networking stack in Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems has seemingly skyrocketed following the release of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite in the fall of last year.
Many people blamed the Wi-Fi issues on the new ‘discoveryd’ process being used by Apple in the OS. Users reported that they were able to temporarily solve the issue by killing the buggy ‘discoveryd’ process through Terminal.
Having installed El Capitan on my MacBook Air yesterday along with iOS 9 on my iPad Air, I’m happy to report that the vast majority of Wi-Fi problems plaguing users have become a thing of the past, here’s why.
Most, if not all of networking issues plaguing Yosemite and iOS 8 users can be pinpointed to Apple’s irrational decision to replace the trusty old mDNSResponder process that has handled networking on Macs for twelve years with a brand new one called discoveryd, which does the same thing.
Here’s the dreaded discoveryd process as captured in Activity Monitor on Yosemite.
According to 9to5Mac, Apple has replaced ‘discoveryd’ with ‘mDNSResponder’ in both iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 Capitan. This should lead to better networking performance and stability on iOS and MacBooks running these OSes. It is, however, unknown if Apple has made any changes to the process since the fourth beta of OS X 10.10.4 or not.
