performance impact of large /etc/hosts files

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
> Erich Dollansky wrote:
> 
> 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 

this is how I started. Then friends did the same. We exchanged the 
files. We added hosts files from the Internet.

> 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 

I also do not notice a difference. Especially news sites with all the 
ads are even faster as there is no waiting for the ads.

> I'm pretty sure you could also do the same with a local DNS server, if 

This is what I am thinking of since some time but I never did.

It would have the additional advantage of faster name resolution.

Having a DNS on every machine seems like a real overkill to me.

> There's no clean solutions to getting different lookups per-user that I 

The clen solution is hosts.

> Unclean solutions might include something like making the hosts file 

This is something I would like to avoid.

Erich