DNS Lookups for local MAMP web server URL taking 5+ seconds

Question

I'm running MAMP on OS X 10.7. I've set up a virtual host in Apache, like so:

<Directory "/sites/example.com/">
Allow From All
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName "example.local"
    ServerAlias "www.example.local"
    DocumentRoot "/sites/example.com"
</VirtualHost>

In /etc/hosts I've added this:

127.0.0.1 example.local

Everything works fine, and up to maybe a week or two ago was very fast. I'm not sure what changed, but now the DNS Lookup portion of the request takes upwards of 5 seconds nearly every time the page is loaded, as reported by both Firebug and Chrome.

Pinging the local address looks good:

->ping example.local
PING example.local (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.073 ms

Here's what Chrome shows:

If I refresh immediately after the first connection, the DNS lookup appears to be cached. But refreshing again a short time later causes the slow lookup again.

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Well, example.local is typically an mDNS (Zeroconf) address, so there's every possibility that your mDNS config has broken in some way, and it's taking a few seconds for that to timeout before it falls back to /etc/hosts.

Why not just add localhost as a ServerAlias and just access it via that name? Otherwise, at least use a domain that doesn't have a top-level domain that has a different meaning to your system.

Answer 2

Yuo can also use domains which don't have .something, so just example without the .local. As mentioned here http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2011/07/27/mac-os-x-lion-etc-hosts-bugs-and-dns-resolution/ it appears OSX uses the .local for Bonjour.

I tested using just example without the .local and it appears to be solving this issue.