This may be of interest to anyone who received complaints of slowness to the Netscape home page yesterday. You can't use anything in this message to configure your router. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 14:48:44 -0700 From: Duane Wessels <wessels@nlanr.net> To: ircache@nlanr.net Cc: Jeff Halper <squid@ihot.com> Subject: Re: Netscape sites very slow today Resent-Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 13:52:20 -0800 (PST) Resent-From: ircache@nlanr.net Yesterday, Jeff Halper asked this on our squid-users list:
I use parent cache sv - noticed it was uusually slow in fetching sites at netscape.com today - any suggestions?
The problem turned out to be sort of interesting, so I thought I'd share it with you... First I thought I'd see if Jeff was imagining things or if there really was a difference. So I looked at the "service time" value for *.netscape.com requests from four days of access logs. The results were: Median Service Date Time (seconds) ----- -------------- Jan 3 2.47 Jan 4 3.47 Jan 5 5.81 Jan 6 76.17 So obviously, something was seriously wrong. The next thing to try was a simple ping: sv-wessels> ping www.netscape.com PING www-uk2.netscape.com (195.44.254.3): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 195.44.254.3: icmp_seq=5 ttl=248 time=603 ms 64 bytes from 195.44.254.3: icmp_seq=6 ttl=248 time=550 ms Say what? WWW-UK2? sv.cache, located at FIX-West, uses ns.arc.nasa.gov for DNS service. Every time I checked the rest of that day, ns.arc.nasa.gov always returned www-uk2.netscape.com, even though the DNS TTL was quite low (less 15 minutes). dig @ns.arc.nasa.gov www.netscape.com ; <<>> DiG 2.0 <<>> @ns.arc.nasa.gov www.netscape.com ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY , status: NOERROR, id: 10 ;; flags: qr rd ra ; Ques: 1, Ans: 2, Auth: 3, Addit: 3 ;; QUESTIONS: ;; www.netscape.com, type = A, class = IN ;; ANSWERS: www.netscape.com. 94 CNAME www-uk2.netscape.com. www-uk2.netscape.com. 2344 A 195.44.254.3 Looks to me like some DNS smart-resolution feature gone haywire. I sent mail to dns-admin@netscape.com, but have yet to get a reply. Since it seemed that ns.arc.nasa.gov was not going to "fix itself" any time soon, I changed sv's resolv.conf to use a different DNS server temporarily. Today, ns.arc.nasa.gov is giving us good answers (www24.netscape.com). Shrug. Duane W.