Websites hanging on load sometimes

I ended up using my server as the DNS, I found the XG was not reliable performance wise.

Ian

My link speeds are not brilliant, main (mine and other devices) one 4 mb/s 400kb/s, backup (wife's) 3.22mb/s 520kb/s.

(I thought I already posted this but must have forgotten to click post...)

What do you mean by "not reliable performance wise"? Is it the same as I am describing where sometimes a website just won't load initially, but then does on a subsequent attempt?

I created the following script that loops around restarting dnsd and then doing some lookups and reporting any that take more than 1000ms:

#!/bin/sh

test_domains="reddit.org abc.net.au slashdot.org www.bendigobank.com.au bendigobank.com.au"

while [ 1 ]
do
 service dnsd:restart -ds sync
 sleep 20
 for domain in $test_domains
 do
  host -W 1 -t a $domain >/dev/null || echo failed to look up $domain
 done
done

Without the "sleep 20", the first request takes around 2 seconds. dnsd must need a bit of time to start up maybe?

I ran it overnight and got 11 reports of "failure" out of 1400 iterations. This is on a 50mbit link so I wouldn't expect any dns request to take more than a second, but measuring "failure" as >1000ms is probably still a bit harsh. I will change it to 2 seconds and see if it makes any difference.

James

(I thought I already posted this but must have forgotten to click post...)

What do you mean by "not reliable performance wise"? Is it the same as I am describing where sometimes a website just won't load initially, but then does on a subsequent attempt?

I created the following script that loops around restarting dnsd and then doing some lookups and reporting any that take more than 1000ms:

#!/bin/sh

test_domains="reddit.org abc.net.au slashdot.org www.bendigobank.com.au bendigobank.com.au"

while [ 1 ]
do
 service dnsd:restart -ds sync
 sleep 20
 for domain in $test_domains
 do
  host -W 1 -t a $domain >/dev/null || echo failed to look up $domain
 done
done

Without the "sleep 20", the first request takes around 2 seconds. dnsd must need a bit of time to start up maybe?

I ran it overnight and got 11 reports of "failure" out of 1400 iterations. This is on a 50mbit link so I wouldn't expect any dns request to take more than a second, but measuring "failure" as >1000ms is probably still a bit harsh. I will change it to 2 seconds and see if it makes any difference.

James

Hi James,

reliability performance wise, I found that using the XG as the primary DNS the response times varied and yes sometime the first attempt would not load, but a second browser would load quickly.

I have the same issue with my MBP, but not on other devices my wife's MBP or iPad all load quickly first time and that is using the server as a the DNS. I am currently running v17.0.3 mr-3 and performance has improved since early yesterday morning, not sure what happened in the XG scanning updates. I didn't get a failure first thing this morning.

Ian

Extra information:- my wife used to complain about how long her European sites took to load, that is one example, then I showed her the status bar at the bottom of the web page showing 'waiting for sitexxxx to load', performing tls handshake. Changing to the server has reduced the waiting time. I also did lookup tests and traceroute to show her how far electronically the connection is to help set expectations.

Then of course there is the big performance improvement when using the phone hotspot, no firewall to check sites visited.