Out of the blue my computer started to be sluggish as hell. I'm still not sure why this suddenly became a problem, but it did.
This post concerns a slow dns problem in Ubuntu 11.04, although I suspect you could apply this to other versions as well.
After some searching I learned about
time (neato trick) and when I compared
time nslookup google.com to
time nslookup google.com 8.8.8.8 it was 2s vs 0.025s... What the?
After some more searching, I ended up on
this thread which mentions a file called
/etc/nsswitch.conf which contains an entry called
hosts. For me this was set to:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
It was suggested to change this to
hosts: files dns wins mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] mdns4
and to reboot. I did and this worked for me. I have no idea what they mean, but I'm happy that it works now.
Also, during my search I found a tool called
namebench. Maybe it helps you.
In case you don't know, there's a google dns that's easy to remember:
8.8.8.8Hope it helps you :)