New laptop? Check your hosts. /etc/hosts

I’ve just run into a weird problem where RabbitMQ server was running EXTREMELY slow on my laptop for no apparent reason.

After trying a bunch of things and googlig for a while I’ve found out that possible reason for that might be slow host resolution. But everything was running on a localhost!

I’ve checked my /etc/hosts and found out… Well, when I’ve upgraded my MacBook Pro laptop I’ve imported all stuff from previous one (using Apple’s migration assistant), but also did change the new laptop’s network name to avoid conflicts with the old laptop being on the same network. But I did not update /etc/hosts accordingly – it only had 127.0.0.1 associated with the old network name.

Apparently, this is a big deal for RabbitMQ. I’ve been running it like that for more than a month and had no issues with any software whatsoever so far – but RabbitMQ (or possibly the underlying Erlang VM) was doing some special name resolution using my computer network name apparently, and that just didn’t work. Causing it not to report any errors though, but just run EXTREMELY (I mean it!) slow.