DoN. Nichols wrote:
According to JohnM :
Too_Many_Tools wrote:

[ ... ]

Over the last few days I have been doing some serious web surfing and
Ebay is by far the worst offender.

In my case, I am not spending as much money on Ebay as I would if I
could browse faster.

[ ... ]

I've got a bunch of their stuff in my hosts file- ebayststic.com, that
sort of bull, and I've always had pretty fast loading pages. Watch what
loads and try putting some of the useless sounding stuff in hosts, see
if it helps.

If it does, be warned that it could suddenly *stop* working
whenever eBay moves their functions to new machines. When they make
such a change, the DNS is alerted, and names such as ebaystatic.com are
routed to a different machine with a different IP address, after which
they retire the old one.

But your machine will keep trying to reach the old IP address
after such a change, until you kill off the hosts entry and note what IP
address turns out to correspond to the new machine with the old name.

It is better to keep your hosts file clean of external systems
(though it can be used to kill off a lot of spam sources and such. I
tend to do that in the routing tables, instead of in the local hosts
file.

Enjoy,
DoN.


Late response on my part.. I don't know anything about routing tables,
I'm a very basic level geek, but everything in my hosts file is routed
to localhost. I've got a program that fills the graphics that the
browser (Mozilla) needs with tiny little dots so that the page doesn't
sit and wait 'till it times out, works well for me. I seldom see an ad
or flashing banner, if I see one I check it out and add it to the hosts
file, takes about 30 seconds if I can find the shortcut to the file
amongst all the stuff on my desktop screen.

I've read that some WinXP machines have trouble with large hosts files
(in excess of 1Mb), which mine is, but I've noticed no problems so far.
First used the hosts file for directing stuff to localhost with Win98,
then 98SE, no problems with either of those running big host files
either. My Linux OS also doesn't seem to mind it a bit, just about the
first thing I did with that machine.

If anyone's interested, the ebay servers I've got directed to localhost
are ebaystatic.com, pics.ebaystatic.com, include.ebaystatic.com. Pages
load a lot faster and everything works.`

Thanks for the suggestion, I looked up routing tables, need some time to
absorb more though.

John