I was doing some ASP.NET MVC work this evening on my new supa-fast Windows 7 machine using the built-in Visual Studio Cassini webserver. For some odd reason, it was taking a few seconds for my tiny pages to resolve / render. I was using Chrome, so I decided to try Firefox. Firefox was just as slow. I then tried using IE and it performed with the speediness I was used to on my old XP install. I did some digging, and I came across the solution to the problem in two places:
http://www.wagnerdanda.me/2009/12/asp-net-development-server-slow-on-windows-vista7-with-firefox-or-chrome/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1416128/my-local-host-goes-so-slow-now-that-i-am-on-windows-7-and-asp-net-mvc
It turns this is an issue with ipv6 and resolving localhost on Vista and Windows 7. The fix is very easy – you simply need to uncomment the localhost entry in your C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file by changing this:
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
to:
# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
127.0.0.1 localhost
You may need to run your text editor as administrator in order to save the changes.
