98 Guy wrote in :

And even more - any host that you access frequently you can "hard-code"
it's IP address in your hosts file - giving you ultra-fast DNS lookups.


That helps, even when the file access time is taken into account. I've never
tried to quantify it, but on the other hand that might apply more generally,
using an IP directly in other tools.

(It seems to me that if the hosts file can be edited at will, and the edited
version when saved becomes current, that file access really might be an
issue, and might account for reports of slowness when using one. I've never
used a large one so I can't confirm that, but Proxomitron will load a list
manually into RAM, speeding accesses. I guess a hosts file will be cached,
but that might only be a consistent speed advantage if it does not have to
re-fetch it from file much).