Hello Tony,
Assuming your domain name is resolved to your public IP address on the outside
of the firewall/NAT, your assumption is right.
When entering localhost in the URL, that's resolved to 127.0.0.1, your local
machines loopback interface. No Ethernet networking involved, so watching with
Wireshark won't show this traffic at all (unless capturing the on the loopback
interface on a !Windows machine).
When entering the FQDN in the URL, that's resolved to your outside address.
Browser traffic flows to that address first, then comes back to access the
Apache server. Now you'll see the traffic when you capture on the network
interface, once going out and once coming in.
In the circumstance that there's no NAT involved (so your outside address is
your interface address) you still end up with more delay that going through the
loopback interface. The extra DNS interactions, and probably additional safety
measures of your platform, take away a little time for every object retrieved.
Thanks,
Jaap
On 03/09/2011 11:11 PM, Tony Anecito wrote:
Hi All,
I was running some performance tests last week and noticed with the client app
running on the same server or apache web server machine the response time was
much better when using localhost in the url versus my domain name. I assumed
somehow the connection is bypassing my router and connecting to the apache
process directly. Is that so and if not what should I see on Wireshark if
anything? Or is even the tcp/ip stack short circuited?
Thanks,
-Tony
