OS X 10.6.8 64-bit

Adding all those lines results in a 5Mb hosts file. As soon as the lines are added and the hosts file saved, DirectoryService process shoots up to nearly 200% and sits there until I put the hosts flle back to normal. It brings my computer to a crawl! I can duplicate this consistently, over and over.

normal hosts file = all things normal
hosts file with 5Mb worth of extra lines added = DirectoryService causing maxed out CPU usage.

Wow.

I'm no stranger to editing the hosts file. (I'm an IT adminsitrator.) Permissions are correct, nothing else wrong.

Tried:
1) copied and pasted lines into a copy of my existing hosts file and wrote it to /private/etc (over-writing existing)
2) removing the extension from the downloaded HOSTS.TXT file (linux version) and writing it into /private/etc (turned it into a unix executable - odd)
3) multiple restarts
4) dns cache flush
Same result, every time.

Never seen anything like this before. Never had a 5Mb host file either...

Help?

Sorry for taking so long. I've not got a MAC myself, but have you tried the mac_hosts.zip file?

Just gave it a go. The process DirectoryService spikes CPU usage to about 170% each time I navigate to a webpage but then quickly drops back down, as opposed to before, when it would stay peaked that high indefinitely. Of course, it's not blocking anything because the format of the entries is incorrect (DNSname CNAME IP as opposed to IP DNSname) but interesting behavior nonetheless. I suppose it quickly parses the file and finds nothing to process, since it's incorrectly formatted.

Am I really the only one experiencing this?

Unfortunately, alot don't actually contact me to let me know of problems. You're only the second using a MAC to report issues (got a friend with a MAC that's not experiencing any problems, but he's running an older 32bit OSX version).

Unfortunately, at present, I'm unsure what the issue could be (though suspect it could be the MAC equivalent of the Windows DNS Client issue)

I was thinking the same thing, but haven't gone in to disable client-side DNS caching yet. Maybe I'll give that a try later.

No problem. If you do give it a try, please let me know if it works.

Will do. FWIW, running dscacheutil -cachedump shows that the cache size is only 19, so apparently it's only caching the most recent entries. I've been working with it while monitoring the DirectoryService CPU usage. Today, once I left it for a couple minutes, it settled down. Each time the browser loads a webapage, it spikes as before, but only for 10-15 seconds, as opposed to a second or so with a small hosts file. So it appears as though it's parsing the file each time, and 5MB is taking awhile to parse.

Contrary to the local DNS caching problem on Windows, it appears as though OSX is only caching the most recent entries, thus the dns service must parse the file each time, completely opposite of the windows local caching problem. So that's not the problem. I think the file is simply too large to deal with.

In the meantime, is there a slimmer version, with the most common entries, rather than everything?

Thanks for letting me know.

There's not a slimmer version no. There is the partial update, but that obviously only includes those added since the last full update.

http://hosts-file.net/?s=Download

I ran into the same exact problem. I don't think it is rare, every Snow Leopard should have the same issue.

And I just made a guide for this actually: http://fatbloke.tumblr.com/post/7228329 ... ng-dnsmasq

Hope it helps!

PS, please use the non-mac file: hosts.zip - not mac_hosts.zip - Mac version doesn't work (even as a vanilla HOSTS file), I don't think it is compatible with Snow Leopard.

Thanks for the reply, and my apologies for the delay in approving it.