On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue,
I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's at least in part due to DNS.
Hard-coding different values into my hosts file allows me to more
consistently control which site loads first. (Note: If you do this,
make sure to pick pages to compare that have the same number of
images, since using just one IP address significantly slows down the
loading of the page as your browser will no longer request files in
parallel.)
I don't have the time to try all 6x6 combinations right now (running
out the door) but it really does seem that picking and choosing which
IP address to use for each domain makes a very significant difference.
I'm not sure why some servers would be consistently slower than
others, but perhaps some DNS resolvers choose the highest/lowest
address in a list rather than the first/last/random one, and that
could bias things quite a bit.
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the
English site due
to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
It's probably both. I was testing the homepage on each site earlier,
which was probably the stupidest page for me to test since it's
obviously going to be cached. When comparing some random page on the
French and English sites, it's far more likely that the English one
will be cached.
-Bill Clark