www clients and dns

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 30 Sep 93 18:34:11 -0500


It seems to be the experience of quite a few Mosaic 2.0pre4 users (now
that the status line tells you exactly what's happening at each stage
of a connection and data transfer) that DNS hostname lookups often
take a very long time in relation to the actual time needed for the
connection and data transfer.

This brings up an interesting question: should we therefore maintain a
cache of hostnames and IP addresses on the client side to try to paper
this (non-Mosaic) problem over, or should we leave it up to DNS to be
fast or slow as it wishes at each installation and put the burden on
the DNS and network admins to make sure it gets faster if users are
unhappy?

Marc