On deviantART each deviant of us is assigned a sub-domain name in the form [name].deviantart.com. This is wonderful and gives the artist a higher URL branding priority than deviantART itself! Unfortunately it has a (technical) side effect. To understand it you have to understand first what the Domain Name System (DNS) is. I'll try to simplify it.

When you access a web page, you open a browser a type it's address in a human-readable form, for example wwww.deviantart.com. At the network level, computers identify each other by using a numerical IP address in the form [link], for example 69.28.181.43. For your computer to retrieve the web page you want to access, it has to resolve the human-readable address you wrote (that's www.deviantart.com) to it's IP address counterpart (that's 69.28.181.43) and so it does. It talks to servers usually provided by your Internet service provider, obtains the IP address for the web server containing the web page you want to access and finally establishes a connection to retrieve the page. The address look-up part is known as the Domain Name System (DNS).

As said earlier, when you sign up to deviantART, you are assigned a sub-domain of deviantart.com. Sub-domains may exist on different servers than their base domain. It means dancewiththesky.deviantart.com may exist on a different server than deviantart.com and may not. It means whenever you access a deviant profile, your computer will look up it's sub-domain. If you browse around deviantART for a while, your browser may make even hundreds of queries to resolve the sub-domains and this takes time. The IP addresses doesn't change very often (it happens rarely) so basically most of these queries are useless. If we could teach FireFox to "remember" the IP addresses for a while before looking them up again your browsing will be faster.

So can you teach Firefox to remember the IP address of the domain names it looks up? Be default it does, but only 20 addresses for 60 seconds! So we will configure it to remember a maximum of 500 IP addresses for 3 hours. The steps are so simple:

- Open a new tab and enter "about:config" in the address field and press Enter.
- Right-click on the list and select New > Integer
- Type network.dnsCacheExpiration as the name, press Enter and type 10800 as the value (3 days' worth in seconds.)
- Right-click (again) on the list and select New > Integer
- Type network.dnsCacheEntries as the name, press Enter and type 500 as the value.

Done! That will actually work for all sites you visit and hang around for a while not just deviantART. Hope that helps.

=dancewiththesky


Read more:
* DNS on Wikipedia
* network.dnsCacheExpiration on MozillaZine
* network.dnsCacheEntries on MozillaZine