How can I eliminate slow resolving/loading of localhost/virtualhost (a 2-3 second lag) on Mac OS X Lion?

Question

Since setting up my development environments on Mac OS X Lion (brand new macbook air purchased in January 2012), I have noticed that resolving to a virtual host is very slow

Answer 1

A dumb issue that led me to waste some considerable time: after applying @Cleverlemming's answer, I figured out that there were duplicated entries on the hosts file. Something like:

::1          site1.local site2.local site1.local site3.local site4.local
fe80::1%lo0  site1.local site2.local site1.local site3.local site4.local
127.0.0.1    site1.local site2.local site1.local site3.local site4.local

Then IP resolving for site3.local and site4.local takes these 5-seconds of death.

Answer 2

On OSX El Capitan what worked for me was making a duplicate IPv6 entry right above the IPv4 entry like so

fe80::1%lo0 demo.test.dev
127.0.0.1   demo.test.dev

Answer 3

The trick that did it for me was adding

127.0.0.1 locahost

on the first line of the host file.

From all my virtual hosts, only the ones using a database were slow. I believe it's because the process of looking up "localhost" for the database connection slowed things down, since I only added the addresses for my virtual hosts and not "localhost" as well. Now it's all snappy again. :)

Answer 4

I had the exact same problem and it was driving me crazy!

Put all your hosts file entries for localhost into one line like so:

127.0.0.1 localhost myproject.dev myotherproject.dev
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost

Worked like a charm for me. Seems like a bug in Lion.

Answer 5

Make sure to put the IP v6 entries not in the line with localhost

::1 localhost

the IP v6 entries go in a separate line

fe80::1%lo0 here and_here

It is sometimes really fast now, but there are rare exceptions where the old lags come back. They might however be based on other reasons.

Answer 6

Specifying same host for IPv6 ::1 helped me.

127.0.0.1 something.local.mydomain.org
::1 something.local.mydomain.org