[14573] in North American Network Operators' Group
Netscape sites very slow today
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Torzillo)
Wed Jan 7 17:24:33 1998
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 14:00:52 -0800 (PST)
From: Tony Torzillo <torzillo@cac.washington.edu>
To: nanog@merit.edu
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.
