Dawn of the Geeks

Reverse DNS is a great thing when it works.  It allows the web-server to figure out more meaningful information from an IP address.  The problem is that DNS servers can be unreliable in terms of performance.

Yesterday I was noticing that my sites were taking a long time to load.  I traced the problem back to establishing a connection to the database server.  So I changed the DNS server so it wouldn’t do a reverse DNS lookup.  That didn’t fix it.  I then turned off HostLookup on Apache and now my sites load just fine.

Reverse lookup is not really needed anymore since Google Analytics takes care of that end.  It’s also possible to do reverse lookup later.  Apache doesn’t need it for anything.  It’s just informational.  And I care more about performance than optional information about visitors.

Eventually I may even turn of logging except for the error logs.  But, I need to get things organized better still.