Looking/Waiting for a domain indefinitely

There is a strange behaviour in my laptop, sometimes when I want to open a site, say stackoverflow.com, my browser stays "looking for" or "waiting for" that domain. Apparently doesn't find it right away.

What I usually do is ping that domain and after a moment the browser responds (sometimes its necessary reload the page).

I'm running Firefox 3.0.6 on CentOS 5.3, I have an ethernet connection to a WRT54G v5 router that is connected with the radio modem (Wifi).

I don't know if this is a very generic question, but I want to know if it happened to someone else out there.

Eliseo Ocampos

Posted 2009-07-16T01:21:51.830

Reputation: 133

does it happen only with firefox? – Svish – 2009-07-16T01:26:07.163

@Svish: Noup, it happens with other browsers too. – Eliseo Ocampos – 2009-07-16T02:26:00.087

Answers

What you are describing can simply be temporarily internet connectivity issues, such as interference when using wifi. When packets are lost you can easily be "stranded" for a couple of seconds waiting for a reply, and when you then ping the host, it tries to fetch the DNS information again, which is then cached.

Simply put: temporarily connectivity issues, resorting in delays and/or lost packets. Solution: encrypting your wifi would decrease interference, also check if anything else is using your bandwidth.

Thor

Posted 2009-07-16T01:21:51.830

Reputation: 3 562

Yeah, that's what I supposed, but I wanted to be sure (by the way, how can I encrypt my wifi? Can you point me in the right direction? I see this could be interesting :) ) – Eliseo Ocampos – 2009-07-16T02:29:58.990

To encrypt your wifi you need to (in very simple terms) 1) find out what address your wireless router/switch has 2) open its IP address in your browser 3) find the security part of the settings. I made it sound extremely simple, but it's as simple as it sounds to enter the right input into the right fields. I recommend searching for your model and some tutorials, if not, you could always open another question. :) – Thor – 2009-07-16T10:26:04.247

If it says "Waiting for" then that means that it has already resolved the host name into an IP address.

So you know for sure you have connectivity to your DNS server.

Then it sends out a request to the IP address (default port 80).

And all it can do is wait for a response.

What you are describing could be a marginal connection, where the packets to DNS can get through because they are small and few, so a few retries will ultimately give the result.

Then the web page itself, being comprised of many more packets, could be having to have a lot of them resent. This can cause long delays.

The reason it seems to go on forever is that you are getting SOME packets through during this process.

If there were none then Firefox (of any version) times out and tells you it can't find it.

To troubleshoot this I'd suggest using PING in a CMD window - first to your gateway, then to your DNS server, and finally, to the target address.

Take a close look at the response times.

That should help you localize the issue.

SDsolar

Posted 2009-07-16T01:21:51.830

Reputation: 1 206