Fixing ipv6 DNS Delayed Server Response

Situation and Solution

• The Challenge
• First changes: /etc/resolv.conf
• More changes: /etc/gai.conf
• Solution: nameserver order
• Nothing to restart - just test

The Challenge: Run IPv6, overcome slow DNS lookups

DNS lookups were taking 5 seconds each time, every time (for many applications, which rely on glibc. Net searches do show a history of this problem. And possible workarounds. Ultimately, the root cause is external, however, making the ideal solution a little hard to reach.

The Attempts: /etc/resolv.conf

The timeout option below did work - sort of. The issue was still occurring, but now only costing 1 second rather than the default 5. The other line solutions didn't have any effect, either alone or in combination with the gai.conf change.

 
options timeout:1 
options single-request
options single-request-reopen

The Attempt: /etc/gai.conf

Making this change had no apparent effect at all. Also tried with the others above in /etc/resolv.conf. No luck.

 
precedence ::ffff:0:0/96  100

Simple solution

 
nameserver 209.244.0.4
nameserver 2001:470:1f10:c6::2
nameserver 209.244.0.3 

The nameserver lines in /etc/resolv.conf were the solution. Presumably the following would also work:

 
  options rotate

The previous structure of /etc/resolv.conf had that IPv6 nameserver first. This meant that the IPv6 nameservers were queried made first - every time. And timing out, in my case, in 5 seconds, for IPv4 domain lookups. IPv6 is enabled on the host and functional. But IPv4 DNS was very slow before I put the IPv4 nameserver at the top of the list. Presumably IPv6 DNS are now very slow if the v4 nameserver is queried first, but that's a separate problem.

There is no need to restart any application each time you change one of these files. Just try a new curl or getaddrinfo enabled request.