Slow localhost in Chrome

For a while now I’ve been doing most of my web coding locally on my laptop, creating virtual .local hosts in Apache (like unbindery.local) and aliasing them to localhost in /etc/hosts. That was all well and good, but in Chrome there would always be a two or three second delay when first hitting a page on one of these local vhosts. Subsequent page views would be fast, but if I waited more than a minute or two, it would be slow again.

I finally googled around and just found that the problem is the .local — it’s used by Bonjour on the Mac, causing conflicts that Chrome doesn’t quite know how to resolve quickly. (Safari does, though.)

So, all you have to do is change the name of the vhost to something else — from unbindery.local to unbindery.dev, for example. Works like a charm, and my goodness, I can’t believe I waited this long to fix it.

Update: Turns out this is also the reason my terminal tabs would take two or three seconds to come up. It’s really fast now. Alleluia.