A PSA: Lion and .local Domain Names
Do you enjoy your hair? Would you prefer not to pull it out while waiting for your local Apache server on Mac OS X to deliver a page to you?
If you use Mac OS X Lion and have development sites set up at .local addresses, you should immediately move them to any other fake TLD. The .local address space is resolved for Bonjour and as a result any request to a .local name will not hit /etc/hosts first, but will search for Bonjour hosts first.
I found this Stack Exchange question on the subject tonight after getting frustrated with curl seemingly hanging for several seconds on each request.
Instead, I switched all of my local dev sites from $DOMAIN.local to $DOMAIN.dev. The results are staggering.
Since switching all my development sites to end in .dev, requests for them happen several orders of magnitude faster, which is a welcome change. Here are two examples of an Apache 404 page (such that the DNS resolution time is the only appreciable time spent in delivering a response to curl.)
┌┤smerrill@Tinier-Shinier:6 [Sep 07 23:43:35] ~
└╼ time curl http://whatever.local/ > /dev/null
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 72 100 72 0 0 1217 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1250
real 0m5.011s
user 0m0.006s
sys 0m0.003s
┌┤smerrill@Tinier-Shinier:6 [Sep 07 23:43:46] ~
└╼ time curl http://whatever.dev/ > /dev/null
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 72 100 72 0 0 1412 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1440
real 0m0.060s
user 0m0.007s
sys 0m0.004sThat's right - the request goes from a lag of almost 5 seconds to finishing in the blink of an eye. A coworker reported his times going from 12 seconds to less than a tenth of a second. It's amazing what a difference such a small change in DNS can make.
I hope this speeds up your local web development!