Beware of DNS

For some time the server running this site had been acting up. Page loads were slow, access through SSH seemed lagging and something was absolutely misbehaving.

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly was going on, but nothing really made sense. there were plenty of disk space, memory was reasonable utilized (no swapping) and the CPU load seemed to be less than 0.1 at any time - there were no good reason the server was “turtling” along at such a perceived slow pace.

Thanks to a tip from Henrik Schack, the server is now running at full speed again. it turned out that one of the DNS resolvers used by the machine was in a bad state and slow, unreliable or dysfunctional DNS causes trouble all sorts of places. The fix was quite easy, the file /etc/resolv.conf was updated to contain the IPs of the Google Public DNS servers, and once the file was saved things were back to the rapid normal.

All computers really need solid, fast DNS servers these days - be it servers or workstations - as the auto-updates and the utilization of “cloud-resources” of various kind much have DNS working to reach out to the destinations they need. If your system starts acting up without any reasonable explanation, checking DNS could be an easy place to start checking things.