In article <20060802232824.GA20974@monolith.vc.shawcable.net>,
Brian de Alwis  <bsd@cs.ubc.ca> 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?

Yes, there was a bug in select() and poll() a couple of weeks ago
that has since been fixed.

christos