Chrome DNS lookup time local address

Question

I'm developing a local site in Windows 7 using WAMP, with a domain of sitename.local. I have sitename.local in my hosts file poiting to 127.0.0.1. I'm getting DNS lookup times of around 6 seconds in chrome. If I immediately reload the page it's instant, but if I wait a minute and reload it I have to wait for a further 6 seconds for the DNS lookup.

My question, why is it having to do a DNS lookup if it's a local address listed in my hosts file? And is there any way I can reduce this time?

A bit of additional information, using the chrome://net-internals I can see that the cache is only ever a minute long, and when this cache expires this is what causes the lengthy lookup time. But should this really affect anything as it shouldn't need to look anything up?

Answer 1

Your issue may be with the .local domain. It has special behavior. I'm not a DNS expert, but had the "pleasure" of debugging a related issue with a friend some time ago. It boiled down to trying to resolve the .local domain via multicast in the network. See a quick explanation here.

Try changing to sitename.com to force the resolution using the hosts file.