Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:00:05 +0000 From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> To: Erich Dollansky <oceanare@pacific.net.sg>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: performance impact of large /etc/hosts files Message-ID: <475EC215.8060004@dial.pipex.com> In-Reply-To: <475EB887.6070902@pacific.net.sg> References: <475E0190.7030909@pacific.net.sg> <200712111718.05876.nvass@teledomenet.gr> <475EAC9D.1020902@pacific.net.sg> <20071211084309.A16234@wonkity.com> <475EB887.6070902@pacific.net.sg>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Erich Dollansky wrote: > But new sites have new stuff I would like to be filtered out. To make > these experiences as rare as possible, I collect from friends and the > Internet hosts files to filter as much as possible. > > This resulted in a pretty large file meanwhile. > > But the Internet looks much more usable for me now. Assuming I've understood your initial post correctly, then I do the same, redirecting some dozen ad sites to a local web server. With a dozen or so aliases I've never noticed any difference in performance, but I suspect you have rather more than that :-) I could never quite be bothered to maintain the list once I'd filtered ads from the sites I use most often. I think the answer to your original question is going to be "look at the source code". If your hosts file is really that large then I suspect it will be having a performance effect and only you can judge if it's significant or not. Large hosts files are not the future, so performance improvements in the future are unlikely, I would say. I'm pretty sure you could also do the same with a local DNS server, if you wanted to "abuse" it in this way, and that would *probably* be faster since the code would expect to deal with large lists of hosts. Been a while since I did anything like that, though, and never on the scale you seem to be describing. There's no clean solutions to getting different lookups per-user that I am aware of, but unless your host is also performing some service that involves a lot of name resolution then why care? (And if it is, you shouldn't be using it as a general web browser :-)) Unclean solutions might include something like making the hosts file point to some automounted directory which changed per user, but you'd have to be sure that you saw a valid hosts file at boot time. Fiddling with symlinks in rc scripts could do that, I'm sure. --Alex
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?475EC215.8060004>