Bizarre DNS issue with graphical browsers.

Any pointers on this appreciated.

It takes graphical browsers such as konqueror/firefox up to 20 seconds from the time I make a request until the page starts loading. My mail client (Thunderbird) also seems to take some time looking up my ISP's POP3 server.
With console browsers such as links response is practically instant. I've been trying to diagnose this issue this evening but I'm getting nowhere... All signs point to a fast connection.


$ time nslookup www . slashdot . org
Server: 192.168.1.254
Address: 192.168.1.254#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www . slashdot . org
Address: 66.35.250.151

0.01user 0.00system 0:00.05elapsed 35%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+515minor)pagefaults 0swaps


Nowhere near the 20 seconds that some apps are taking. Is my bandwidth being swallowed somewhere?


$ ping -c 4 www . google . com
PING www . google . akadns . net (66.102.11.104) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=247 time=58.4 ms
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=2 ttl=247 time=60.8 ms
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=3 ttl=247 time=62.7 ms
64 bytes from 66.102.11.104: icmp_seq=4 ttl=247 time=62.5 ms

--- www . google . akadns . net ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3001ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 58.435/61.154/62.749/1.752 ms


Seems reasonable. My setup is fairly simple - IP assigned by DHCP server running on NAT/DSL modem. Any help appreciated. Thanks.

I know there was an issue with the lastest Firefox on OpenBSD becuase Firefox was trying (and failing) to do IPv6 lookups. Now you mentioned Konqueror as well, but perhaps Konq is trying to do IPv6 lookups, too?

Try running tcpdump or Ethereal when you try to connect to a website and see how many/what kind of DNS lookups are being done.

I'm no expert at reading packet dumps, in fact this is my first time
It looks like firefox resolves the domain alright, then has trouble actually reaching it. links' output is much shorter and doesn't appear to have any errors.
It should be noted the google.com directs requests to google.ie

http:/ /homepage . eircom . net/~fuzzbucket/tmp/firefox-tcpdump.txt
http:/ /homepage . eircom . net/~fuzzbucket/tmp/links-tcpdump.txt

I am dealing with the same thing. I set the cache in the browser to 0mb and that seemed to help, but I need to do further testing.

No luck on that front. Thanks anyway.

Curiouser and curiouser, I just downloaded Opera and it resolves & begins downloading as fast as links.

Problem solved. It seems having IPv6 enabled can slow down certain apps (I assume only IPv6 aware ones) so I simply disabled it (inserted "alias net-pf-10 off" in /etc/modules.conf)

Much improved. Thanks for your suggestions, folks!

Thanks I will try that tonight.

Well, it was chort's idea