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Ian
Asked: 2011-07-23 21:20:19 +0800 CST

DNS Lookups for local MAMP web server URL taking 5+ seconds

  • 772

I'm running MAMP on OS X 10.7. I've set up a virtual host in Apache, like so:

<Directory "/sites/example.com/">
Allow From All
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName "example.local"
    ServerAlias "www.example.local"
    DocumentRoot "/sites/example.com"
</VirtualHost>

In /etc/hosts I've added this:

127.0.0.1 example.local

Everything works fine, and up to maybe a week or two ago was very fast. I'm not sure what changed, but now the DNS Lookup portion of the request takes upwards of 5 seconds nearly every time the page is loaded, as reported by both Firebug and Chrome.

Pinging the local address looks good:

->ping example.local
PING example.local (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.073 ms

Here's what Chrome shows:

Chrome Network Panel Output

If I refresh immediately after the first connection, the DNS lookup appears to be cached. But refreshing again a short time later causes the slow lookup again.

Any help would be appreciated!

domain-name-system localhost mamp

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well, example.local is typically an mDNS (Zeroconf) address, so there's every possibility that your mDNS config has broken in some way, and it's taking a few seconds for that to timeout before it falls back to /etc/hosts.

    Why not just add localhost as a ServerAlias and just access it via that name? Otherwise, at least use a domain that doesn't have a top-level domain that has a different meaning to your system.

    • 5

  2. Yuo can also use domains which don't have .something, so just example without the .local. As mentioned here http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2011/07/27/mac-os-x-lion-etc-hosts-bugs-and-dns-resolution/ it appears OSX uses the .local for Bonjour.

    I tested using just example without the .local and it appears to be solving this issue.

    • 2

  3. I've had this issue with non .local sites when using AJAX- I managed to fix it by adding the following lines to /etc/hosts

    ::1 slow-site.url      
fe80::1%lo0 slow-site.url

    above the main block of sites for each offending site where 'slow-site.url' is 'example.local' or whatever.

    it's a IPv6 address - more details here:

    https://superuser.com/questions/241642/what-is-the-relevance-of-fe801lo0-localhost-in-etc-hosts

    • 2