Netscape sites very slow today

[Tony Torzillo <torzillo () cac washington 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.