Unless you take special action, the archive of the old MacFixIt forums is glacially slow. The problem boils down to this line in the HTML:

<script language="JavaScript" src="http://madstage.com.com/mac-ad?CELT=JS&BRAND=6&SITE=134&SP=15&pos=100&ncat=macfixit:vendorforum:"></script>

and the reason that's a problem is revealed by:

$ host madstage.com.com
madstage.com.com is an alias for c13-ad-adm2.cnet.com.
c13-ad-adm2.cnet.com has address 10.15.56.114

The idiots internet wizards who set up the archive left a reference to a non-globally-routable IP address on every page! Naturally, it works wonderfully when they test in-house.

The recommended fix, from the early days of FineTunedMac, has been to add the line:

127.0.0.1 madstage.com.com

to /etc/hosts. That worked fine. Until Lion.

Lion now consults /etc/resolv.conf before consulting /etc/hosts. (I've seen a suggestion that it's "instead of" rather than "before", but I've verified that /etc/hosts will successfully serve up an IP address for an ad-hoc domain name.)

The rub is that /etc/resolv.conf points to my DHCP-mandated DNS server, which "resolves" the address successfully, for some definition of success, and the system sees no need to consult /etc/hosts. The delay isn't in the DNS lookup but in the subsequent vain attempt to pull down the content.

What remedy would people recommend? The suggestions I've seen:

1) Go back to Snow Leopard. (Not an option.)

2) Install MacPorts, and use that to install DNSMasq.
This seems like overkill, but I haven't ruled it out. I had MacPorts installed on my Snow Leopard machine (so I could get modern versions of Rails and git), but haven't felt a need to install it on my Lion machine, which has current-enough tools. My experience with MacPorts is that it's "in for a penny, in for a pound". If you install anything, you have to install the kitchen sink too, and the whole kitchen with it. That's a lot of work to get faster access to a site I almost never visit. I'd probably have a net savings of time by simply ignoring the problem.

3) Someone suggested adding the mapping to Directory Services:
Code:
sudo dscl localhost create /Local/Default/Hosts/madstage.com.com IPAddress 127.0.0.1
but that didn't work when I tried it. Too bad. A one-line fix is about the size I'm looking for. (This mechanism does work on Snow Leopard, but only after a restart. It doesn't work on Lion, even with a restart.)

4) I saw a suggestion that new lines had to be added to the top of /etc/hosts rather than at the bottom. I tried it for completeness, but it was as ineffective as I expected. (The OP for that suggestion probably left off the required linefeed on the final line. Moving the line up in the file fixed that.)