Many websites I am visiting seem slow today, taking 60-80 seconds of wall clock time to load. Ouch. Yet a quick visit to DSLreports.com reveals:
3947Kbps into my house seems to be pretty good, how does that compare with other results out there; it has been a while since I tested. I am really happy with 54ms latency, which seems to be a more pertinent result. So the basic pipe does not seem to be the problem, I’ll have to dig a bit more to find out why page load times are slow.
Update: This has now been solved, it is a slow DNS response over WiFi networks problem. I am not sure why WiFi makes simple DNS requests slow, but I measure ~1 second responses to initial dig requests via WiFi, and ~150 milliseconds via ethernet. So I set up a caching DNS server on my laptop, which in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is trivially easy:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist
sudo launchctl start org.isc.named
In Tiger or Panther you’ll need some more UNIX skills, but it is not very difficult to set up a caching name server on any flavor of Mac OS X. Vastly faster web browsing now!
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