Website Performance

[wkooiman]

I thought you guys would like to know I found a solution to a clubcobra performance problem on my Mac.

The problem has to do with the way Safari does DNS prefetching. Actually, all browsers have this problem, but it is especially an issue with Safari on certain versions of the Mac OS. My Macbook Air is fine. My iMac had terrible performance problems.

When a browser loads a page, it does DNS lookups for every URL it finds on the page. That way, if you click on one of the URLs, the IP address has already been resolved, so the "click" is faster. In my opinion, this is a pretty stupid feature, but somehow Apple didn't call me to ask.

At any rate, certain browsers have issues with this, and it seems to depend on your ISP. Some ISPs are okay. Some are not. The fix is to disable DNS prefetch with this command:

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false

You can turn it back on with this command:

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled

Or, you can simply try another browser. I downloaded Google/Chrome, and it was amazing how much faster it was. After I disabled DNS prefetch, Safari was the same speed as Chrome.

Cool hunh?