Netscape sites very slow today

Wed Jan 7 22:00:52 UTC 1998

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 at nlanr.net>
To: ircache at nlanr.net
Cc: Jeff Halper <squid at ihot.com>
Subject: Re: Netscape sites very slow today 
Resent-Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 13:52:20 -0800 (PST)
Resent-From: ircache at 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 at 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.