I have a website that is occasionally slow loading. I'm not referring to the download speed. But sometimes Firefox's status will sit at "Waiting for xxx.com" for 15-20 seconds. After the wait period, it loads quite fast. Is this because of DNS? My DNS host is afraid.org (free account).
Thanks for helping a newbie out.
This is not a DNS issue. If it was stuck at Looking up xxx.com that would likely be a DNS problem.
If it was Connecting to xxx.com it means your server wasn't responding at all, but with Waiting for there's definitely a problem somewhere, perhaps an Apache misconfiguration.
Install something like Fiddler or YSlow, and watch it as you try to load the sites you have problems with.
The issue was with the the Application pool worker process. Since my website was very new and I was the only one visiting it, occasionally the worker process would shut down if it wasn't active after 20 minutes. So it took some time to start up again when I would visit it.
In IIS, right click the specific application pool and select properties. Under performance, you can change the idle timeout.
Within most browsers you can enable a "status bar" at the bottom. This is an option under the "view" menu at the top. Once done it will tell you the current status of a page you are requesting. If it is in fact being delayed by a DNS lookup then you will see something like "Looking up: domain.com" for an extended period.
You can also perform some lookups via the command prompt to get an idea of how fast they are being performed.
start -> run -> cmd -> nslookup domain.com
Mac/*nix:
terminal -> dig domain.com
