How to disable Java's SSL Reverse DNS Lookup

Question

Hi,

I have a server in development and a few developers connecting to it. This server uses Java's TLS implementation with SSLEngine.

We saw that, at first, every new connection would have a long delay (30-40 seconds). We narrowed it down to reverse DNS lookups timing out. We solved that by putting all our IPs in the HOSTS file.

Now, the problem is that we are going to widen progressively our user base and I don't want to edit the HOSTS file, especially since we can't guarantee that they're going to have static IPs.

Is there any way to disable the reverse DNS lookup step in Java's SSL/TLS?

I'd like to have this as a configurable parameter, so that we can turn it off during development.

Answer 1

This question came up in 2006 on the Sun JSSE forums. The bottom line is that it seems to occur only in the Windows java runtime. In this bug report, towards the bottom, is one proposed solution. And here is another proposed solution. Hopefully one of these will work for you.