I recently put a new SSD in my system (yay!) and did a clean install of Windows 7, Visual Studio, etc. I found that when viewing my web app on localhost (using the Cassini web server built into VS), it was very slow. This was true across browsers.
Turns out it’s a DNS thing – the lookup for “localhost” was apparently going out to the DNS server, a waste. You can easily “short-circuit” this by modifying your hosts file. It’s in the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc folder.
Simply un-comment the localhost entry at the bottom of that file, like so:
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself. 127.0.0.1 localhost # ::1 localhost
It made things lickety-split for me.
Tip: you’ll need to run Notepad as an administrator to modify the file.
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