Comment 310 for bug 417757

There is no question that the underlying problem here is defective DNS resolvers that choke on perfectly legitimate AAA queries. That said, there are a couple of issues present in software shipped by Ubuntu that cause the problem to manifest itself as slowdowns noticeable by end users:

1) When called with the AI_ADDRCONFIG flag, libc's getaddrinfo() function does not disregard link-local IPv6 addresses when determining whether or not the local host has usable IPv6 connectivity. Since every IPv6-capable OS will have link-local IPv6 addresses assigned to all interfaces - regardless of any external connectivity being available or not - this essentially makes AI_ADDRCONFIG on Linux useless for the purpose of suppressing AAAA queries when they're not useful.

I've submitted a bug to the GNU libc upstream about this issue at <http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12377>.

getaddrinfo() on other operating systems (such as Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows) does disregard link-local IPv6 addresses when called with AI_ADDRCONFIG, which is why the problem appears to affect GNU/Linux distributions more than other operating systems.

2) Many applications do not set the AI_ADDRCONFIG flag when calling getaddrinfo(). This includes, notably, Mozilla Firefox. However, a patch to correct this has recently been committed to the mozilla-central developement repo and will likely be part of Firefox 4.0 beta 11 (hopefully also 3.6.15), see <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614526>. Microsoft Windows enables the use of AI_ADDRCONFIG as the system-wide default, as far as I know, which explains why it is able to cope better with those broken middleware boxes. Mac OS X does not set AI_ADDRCONFIG by default, however it has an extremely short timeout waiting for AAAA responses after the A response has been answered (around 125ms), which in turn hides the problem from most end users. Additionally, most major browsers (except Firefox) do set AI_ADDRCONFIG explicitly, which suppress the problematic AAAA queries in the first place.

So what Ubuntu could to avoid this problem is 1) to develop and include a patch to glibc that makes getaddrinfo() ignore link-local addresses for AI_ADDRCONFIG purposes, and 2) to back-port the NSPR patch already committed to mozilla-central to the version of Firefox shipped (or wait until Mozilla releases a new version with the patch already included).

Tore