Reduce Ubuntu latency by disabling mDNS

by Edward Z. Yang

This is a very quick and easy fix that has made latency on Ubuntu servers I maintain go from three to four seconds to instantaneous. If you've noticed that you have high latency on ssh or scp (or even other software like remctl), and you have control over your server, try this on the server: aptitude remove libnss-mdns. It turns out that multicast DNS on Ubuntu has a longstanding bug on Ubuntu where they didn't correctly tune the timeouts, which results in extremely bad performance on reverse DNS lookups when an IP has no name.

Removing multicast DNS will break some applications which rely on multicast DNS; however, if you're running Linux you probably won't notice. There are a number of other solutions listed on the bug I linked above which you're also welcome to try.