Does anyone else find that if they haven't been to the empegbbs for an hour or two, it seems to take an absolute age to load up? It happens at home, at work and on the phone over 3G. It appears to hang at the DNS resolution stage. But after this initial delay every subsequent request is near instantaneous.

Yes. Happens to me too. Over the weekend I was being taken to placeholder site from GoDaddy.

Stu

Yes.

Yes.. feels like slow DNS to me here.

ISTR it started happening after the site moved hosts in May.

This is my impression as well.

Odd, the DNS where empegbbs.com lives didn't change beyond where the A record points. I have been tracking some slowdown when posts are made but this is the first I've heard of it just being slow to load due to DNS.

I'm at Quakecon currently, but will investigate deeper later. There is a possibility some of it is DB slowness, especially after backups are made around 0:00 Central Time ( -5 GMT currently).

Depends on how you define "absolute age..."

It takes me 2--3 seconds to display the main forum page for the first time. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

tanstaafl.

In this day that is quite long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&fmt=22

Haven't noticed any slowdowns yesterday, and today the site is as snappy as always. No complaints here.

Up to 10 seconds, which to me, is enough normally to indicate a site is down.

Yup. 5-10 seconds to get the first load after rebooting my computer, very snappy on subsequent page views.

That's why it feels like DNS slowness -- exact symptom match.

I really should debug it further. Later today, perhaps.

1.49 seconds after fresh power-off restart.

edit: 0.98 seconds without restart.

tanstaafl.

I've noticed this for maybe 2 months or so, 5-10 seconds for the initial page load of the day, then it's instant access to all empeg related content.

Maybe it's a browser specific bug? Anyone else using the Chrome Dev channel as their default browser? I haven't been paying much attention if it happens on firefox, I've used chrome dev as my primary browser for ages.

It appears that the secondary nameserver isn't responding to requests

Seems fine for me. When it hasn't, there's usually been something more drastic, like not being able to load the page at all.

Using Safari.

Mmm.. quicker this evening. Two tries, both more or less instantaneous.

There are a couple of issues here. The secondary nameserver isn't working for one.

http://intodns.com/empegbbs.com

This thread is really weird to me. I've never noticed any delay at all...

I have been seeing about a 20 second delay on the first load both from home and from work for the last couple months.

I just counted 1 minute 30 seconds to load.

Edit: Firefox

Just as extra info points:

no delay for me (ie sub 2 seconds every time) from home (talktalk using OpenDNS) with FF3.6, FF4b1 or Chrome, or from work via Colt telecoms POP in London

No delays here either, AAISP using my own local DNS caching server. Never seen any delays on my iPhone either, via O2.

Odd. I just opened five tabs from the empegbbs. Three opened immediately and two are wedged.

I've been having problems like andym, today all of a sudden it seems better ???

Cheers

Cris.

It seems highly variable. I've had a couple of days where it's popped up instantly but today it's slow.

I'm surprise Tom hasn't said anything in this thread yet. The fact one of the DNS servers is responding would indicate there is an issue of some sort.

I've just redirected the MIA nameserver (ns2.perilith.com) to 127.0.0.1, and no more delay now.

Still.. I wonder if there's something I can set somewhere to have our local caching DNS do parallel lookups and not wait for the MIA nameserver to respond?

Whether it's quick or slow, on any given hour or day, depends upon _which_ nameserver your system or DNS lookup service happens to choose.

So long as they always pick the first server, it will be quick. Whenever they pick the second server, it will be slow -- things have to time-out before they fall back to the first server.

In my case, my local caching server appears to normally try the second server first, causing a five-second delay before it times out and tries the other server.

Cheers

Mmm.. It looks like the failed ns2.perilith.com was once a static IP at the end of somebody's DSL link:

Code:

[~] host NS2.PERILITH.COM
NS2.PERILITH.COM has address 173.203.115.251
[~] host 173.203.115.251
251.115.203.173.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 173-203-115-251.static.cloud-ips.com.

The domain is owned by Vitorio Miliano, in Texas. "Vito" for short.
His current static IP is 173.203.115.13, but he's not running a nameserver on it.
And don't try poking a stick at it, cuz it'll blacklist you (as it did me just now).

I wonder if he's an acquaintance of Tom?

Telephone (in Austin, TX, USA): (phone number removed)
Email is listed as: [b(email removed)[/b]

Or quite possibly, "Vito" is a fake name, and the real admin is Josh Odom of San Antonia, TX.

Enough digging.. just blacklisting ns2.perilith.com is enough to "fix" it for me here.

Cheers