DNS caching in Firefox
18. November 2008
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Sometimes you need to change servers quickly, for example if you're trying to find out which of your 18 webservers is having a problem. When modifying the hosts file, you would expect the browser to point to the new direction (at latest after restarting nscd).
When using Firefox you will have the problem that it will still not work. The reason is simple: Firefox caches DNS entries for 60 seconds by default. In case of 18 webservers that would mean that you have to restart Firefox 18 times or you will have to wait 18 minutes altogether.
For that reason I wrote a simple Firefox Plugin called DNS Cache, that allows you to deactivate the internal DNS caching of Firefox. You can download the plugin at https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/5914.
4 comments
David
10.12.2008, 02:14 o'clock
Go to the menu -> View -> Toolbars -> Customize. Look for the DNS Cache button and drag it into a toolbar.
(Sorry for the empty comments. A damn bug in the theme js. I'll fix this soon.)
Dominik Jungowski
10.12.2008, 11:24 o'clock
I haven't found out yet how to automatically integrate the button :D So long you have to use the way David told you
Len Lynch
10.12.2008, 14:23 o'clock
Excellent! Thank you. Maybe you could put a note under the "options" button so that these instructions come up when you install the add-on? Not ideal, but is functional!
Good Journey!
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Len Lynch
09.12.2008, 00:20 o'clock
First, thanks for making this! I really appreciate it.
I installed the add-on, but I'm not seeing any user interaction button (is that called chrome?) in FF 3.0.4 on Windows XP SP3. I do run as a non-admin user, on this machine.
In the Add-ons manager, the config button is grayed out.
The only option I see is to enable and disable the whole add-on.
There's a screen shot that shows tooltip text that must be associated with a button or something, but I'm not seeing that on my machine.
I can see by filtering on 'network.dnsCache' (from about:config), that enabling the add-on indeed creates/exposes configuration entries, but the integers are NOT zero…
My guess is that the missing button is what sets these values to zero?
Any assistance is appreciated.