Ubuntu Speed Tweak - /etc/hosts

It's come to my attention that this is bad practice.

For those of you using Ubuntu, though likely not applicable ONLY those using Ubuntu, this little tweak gives your application load time a HUGE boost--that is, it makes application load times noticeably shorter.

<disclaimer>I have no idea why this works</disclaimer>

Edit your “/etc/hosts” file:

$ sudo gedit /etc/hosts

You should see something like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 martin-laptop
(and if your in Feisty, some lines about IPV6

Now, add the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost martin-laptop
127.0.1.1 martin-laptop
(Replace “martin-laptop” with your hostname)

Save. Should work instantly, or sometimes on reboot.

Read at Martin Albisetti's blog (via the Ubuntu Planet RSS feed).

To be perfectly honest, I didn't even notice I was taking a performance hit because the sorts of load times I got before this tweak were comparable to load times I've been used to expecting on Windows for a long time.