Dave, what's going on???

It is taking over 2 minutes this afternoon to access a page in DG... Is it me, or your server?

I just clocked this 'preview' panel, and it took over 2 minutes to load!

I don't know, Darius. I've been on DG all day and it's been zippy as usual here.

Very fast loading for me, too. What ISP do you use, Darius? There might be network slowdowns.

Real slow for me also, I have aol

it's fast for me tonight, I can't believe it!! My ISP causes most of my problems.

Dave... I have cable modem, and all sites EXCEPT DG load very fast. At the moment, I am on the old PC with a dial-up modem, AOL, and even it is faster than my usual set-up. I have tried trashing ALL the cache, the magic cookie, etc. and STILL it takes nearly 2 minutes from page to page, or just to the home page.

Any suggestions? PLEASE help if you can. You might have to email since I cannot seem to access threads easily right now.
Thanks,
darius

Dave, Thanks for the FIX! I hope (as you indicated it might) that the fix will help other DG'ers who have had SLOW problems.

No problem, Darius. Thanks for your assistance in finding the problem. I'll be paying close attention to see if any other members still have slow-down problems.

Wow - what was the problem? Glad ya found it! :o)

My webserver calls a function called 'gethostbyaddr()', which determines your hostname. The function gives the server the domain name of where you are coming from, and then I use that information to determine who is hitting the site, and I act accordingly.

For example, if I see the domain is 'google.com', that means they are indexing my site, and I need to slow it down for just them.

If the hostname is someone who I just don't want on DG, I block them by hostname.

Anyway, some ISPs are mis-configured. They will not allow reverse-DNS lookups on your IP address. This was causing my server to get hung up while waiting for a response from that ISP on what their hostname is. If they were configured properly (as almost all ISPs are), then it would have gone right through and the user would have zippy access to the site.

Instead, my server was waiting for 180 seconds for a timeout. 3 minutes per page!

Anyway, I disabled the hostname lookups altogether, so anybody using an ISP who does not do reverse lookups will now experience much faster load times.