On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@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