Subject: Re: Suboptimal DNS lookup in Firefox/Mozilla on lossy net connections?
To: David Brownlee <abs@NetBSD.org>
From: Jorgen Lundman <lundman@lundman.net>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 08/03/2006 21:35:09
Not sure how much code Firefox and Mozilla share these days, but there are a
load of DNS issues when compiling Mozilla. It uses getaddrinfo by default on
NetBSD, and NetBSD's getaddrinfo() is broken. Will very often stall forever and
what not.
When I compile Mozilla I have to make sure nsprpub/pr/include/md/_netbsd.h to
not have _PR_HAVE_GETADDRINFO.
Then it will work better, but not great. If you have too many simultaneous
lookups it can go bad. Probably has the alternative to getaddrinfo() is not
thread safe.
Just a thought if you want to try it.
Lund
David Brownlee wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, Brian de Alwis wrote:
>
>> Hello everybody. I'm seeing some strange DNS resolving behaviour
>> with firefox, and have run out of leads.
>>
>> At home I get to freeride off an open wireless connection. But
>> it's subject to frequent bouts of interference and so the signal
>> fades in and out over the course of a day.
>>
>> I've found that Firefox will start to exhibit rather strange DNS
>> lookup behaviour under this situation, where hostname lookups take
>> extraordinarily long periods of time to resolve -- and sometimes
>> are never resolved. But utilities like ping are able to resolve
>> the name relatively quickly. This behaviour disappears if I quit
>> and restart firefox, but it will reappear if I stop using it for
>> a bit. Replacing the hostnames with the IP addresses works fine.
>>
>> These problems don't occur when I'm at the university, where I'm
>> behind a reliable fat pipe.
>>
>> Does this ring any bells with anybody?
>
>
> No, but in case it helps, a workaround might be to run a caching
> nameserver on your machine locally and point firefox at that...
>
--
Jorgen Lundman | <lundman@lundman.net>
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