Very slow opening of client connections to localhost with httplib

[Martin Fuzzey]

I am using xmlrpclib (based on httplib) in Python 2.3 on Mandrake
Linux.

When my client attempts to connect to a server using a
"http://localhost:port" style URL there is a long delay before the
connection is established (it finally works).

This certainly smells a name resolution problem but ping localhost,
telnet localhost etc all work fine.

Tracking down a bit it appears that the problem comes from the
getaddrinfo() call in  code in HttpConnection.connect() :
    def connect(self):
        """Connect to the host and port specified in __init__."""
        msg = "getaddrinfo returns an empty list"
        for res in socket.getaddrinfo(self.host, self.port, 0,
                                      socket.SOCK_STREAM):

To test this I did :

import socket
socket.getaddrinfo("localhost", 10000, 0, socket.SOCK_STREAM)

and sure enough it blocked for several seconds before finally
returning 127.0.0.1

However
socket.gethostbyname("localhost")
returns immediately

If I remplace the 0 in the getaddrinfo call above by socket.AF_INET
all is fine as well.

So I did a tcpdump to see what it was sending to the nameserver and
got

18:36:01.790045 X.Y.Z.41.32961 > X.Y.Z.12.53:  42057+ AAAA?
localhost.besancon.parkeon.com. (48) (DF)
18:36:01.790526 X.Y.Z.12.53 > X.Y.Z.41.32961:  42057* 0/1/0 (95)
18:36:01.790652 X.Y.Z.41.32961 > X.Y.Z.12.53:  42058+ AAAA? localhost.
(27) (DF)
18:36:06.792898 X.Y.Z.41.32962 > X.Y.Z.215.53:  42058+ AAAA?
localhost. (27) (DF)
18:36:06.793134 X.Y.Z.215.53 > X.Y.Z.41.32962:  42058 ServFail 0/0/0
(27)
18:36:06.793301 X.Y.Z.41.32962 > X.Y.Z.12.53:  42058+ AAAA? localhost.
(27) (DF)
18:36:11.802998 X.Y.Z.41.32963 > X.Y.Z.215.53:  42058+ AAAA?
localhost. (27) (DF)
18:36:11.803222 X.Y.Z.215.53 > X.Y.Z.41.32963:  42058 ServFail 0/0/0
(27)
18:36:13.356344 X.Y.Z.12.53 > X.Y.Z.41.32959:  42056 ServFail 0/0/0
(27)

(my machine is X.Y.Z.41 and the NS is X.Y.Z.12)

When AF_INET or gethostbyname() is used there is no network
communication.

This appears to be a problem with IPV6 DNS queries?? (the AAAA
records). We don't use IPV6 but the 0 parameter (AF_UNSPEC) used in
httplib seems to cause them to be sent.

Anyone else had this problem or got any ideas?

The problem does NOT occur under windows.

Thanks,

Martin