Guus Bosman

You may have noticed that the website has been really slow in the last month or two. Finally, we figured out what the problem was and I'm happy to say that the speed is back to normal.

The problem started two months ago when a new DSL modem was installed and the website started to work really slow. Jaap and I have done a lot of research to see what happened, including re-wiring lots of cables and switches and network cards... thank you so much! The first suspect was the new modem, a "Fritzbox", but all the settings looked fine and there was nothing in the log files. Traceroute told us that performance was quite decent. Thanks also to Ben from OpenNMS for your help.

In the end, it turned out to be unrelated to cables -- instead, there was a configuration setting on the server ("DNS servers") that needed to be updated. Once that was done, performance was back to normal. A great relief.

Before (41 seconds for the main page):

[guus@server ~]# curl http://www.guusbosman.nl > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 23813    0 23813    0     0    579      0 --:--:--  0:00:41 --:--:--  6034

After (less then a second for the main page):

[guus@server ~]# curl http://www.guusbosman.nl > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 23813    0 23813    0     0  36469      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 69431

The quick fix (before updating /etc/resolv.conf):

#
# HostnameLookups: Log the names of clients or just their IP addresses
# e.g., www.apache.org (on) or 204.62.129.132 (off).
# The default is off because it'd be overall better for the net if people
# had to knowingly turn this feature on, since enabling it means that
# each client request will result in AT LEAST one lookup request to the
# nameserver.
#
HostnameLookups Off