Will 10,000 entries in Hosts file slow down XP Pro SP2?

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Windows XP Pro SP2

I'm experiencing a phantom slowdown that seems to have been incremental over
time, but has recently become worse.

I'd like verification on something: I seem to remember an old Win2K bug
where more than a handful of entries in the hosts file caused major
slowdowns. But now I'm running XP Pro.

My hosts file is now over 10,000 entries large (almost all pointing to
127.0.0.1) to clobber ad servers and /some/ viruses. Is this technically a
slowdown situation for Win XP Pro too?

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

In most cases a large HOSTS file (over 135 kb) tends to slow down
a computer. See the following:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------­----------------

:

| Windows XP Pro SP2
|
| I'm experiencing a phantom slowdown that seems to have been incremental over
| time, but has recently become worse.
|
| I'd like verification on something: I seem to remember an old Win2K bug
| where more than a handful of entries in the hosts file caused major
| slowdowns. But now I'm running XP Pro.
|
| My hosts file is now over 10,000 entries large (almost all pointing to
| 127.0.0.1) to clobber ad servers and /some/ viruses. Is this technically a
| slowdown situation for Win XP Pro too?
|
| --
| "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

You should disable the dns client service as is described in the link that
Carey provided.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Al Dykes]

Hi,

You should disable the dns client service as is described in the link that
Carey provided.

FWIW, I've been using the hosts file from

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

(about 9000 entries) on a w2k desktop and a modest XP laptop
(1Ghz/348MB) and find I don't notice any performance slowdown and have
an improved "internet experience" by not seeing all the crap that gets
directed to localhost.

On the desktop I've got a caching DNS running that I installed because
for a couple months my ISP's DNS (Verizon) was really slow. I might
be caching all the entries in the hosts file.

 

[The Free]

It will depend on the power of your machine. IMHO, more shabby machines
will have more significant performance downgrade as host file gets
larger.

The free with his own sword at
http://www.kibase.com

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

The Free said something like:

It will depend on the power of your machine. IMHO, more shabby machines
will have more significant performance downgrade as host file gets
larger.

The system I'm running on is hardly shabby: 3.0Ghz P4 w/HT, 800Mhz FSB, and
there is a slowdown.

Interestingly enough, there is *also* a very large login slowdown as well
that showed up at the same time as my hosts-file-enlarging, both login after
hibernate/switch users, and login from scratch. Dunno what's going
on.....any ideas as to why login time would be affected as well?

 

[Al Dykes]

The Free said something like:

The system I'm running on is hardly shabby: 3.0Ghz P4 w/HT, 800Mhz FSB, and
there is a slowdown.

Interestingly enough, there is *also* a very large login slowdown as well

Login to what?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Al Dykes said something like:

Login to what?

(?) To my account on the system. Is there a different term than login/logon
used in windows xp?

 

[Al Dykes]

Al Dykes said something like:

(?) To my account on the system. Is there a different term than login/logon
used in windows xp?

Domain/AD login. Login to a Uniux shell machine, or even login as
applied to POP email account although that's a stretch.

DNS problems can really screw up an an AD login, which is what I had
in mind.

Look in the event log for errors following your login.

 

[frodo]

there is a better way to reduce the number of ads and other garbage:

http://www.privoxy.org/

works very well "out of the box" w/ its defaults (best for most users),
and can be customized greatly by the determined tinkerer. a great free
tool...

 

[Frazer Jolly Goodfellow]

Hi,

You should disable the dns client service as is described in the
link that Carey provided.

Which is somewhat counter-intuitive to me:

1) DNS Client is initially not started.

2) When browsing to a website you've never visited before, your PC
trawls the blacklist HOSTS file first. Having not found it in the
blacklist, your PC starts up the DNS client and issues a query.

3) The next time you browse to a website you've never visited before,
the DNS Client is already running...

So how does this help?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Frazer Jolly Goodfellow said something like:

Which is somewhat counter-intuitive to me:

1) DNS Client is initially not started.

2) When browsing to a website you've never visited before, your PC
trawls the blacklist HOSTS file first. Having not found it in the
blacklist, your PC starts up the DNS client and issues a query.

3) The next time you browse to a website you've never visited before,
the DNS Client is already running...

So how does this help?

Well, FWIW I've disabled the DNSClient service and the system "seems"
noticably less choked up.

Subjective observations are not worth spit, however, so I'll be (someday)
running the norton benchmark tests before and after a removal of DNSCLient.