I develop on a Mac with MAMP Pro, and I am running Windows 7 in VirtualBox VM so I can test my WordPress sites in Internet Explorer. The problem is that when I try to load the page in a browser in the VM (http://10.0.2.2:8888) it takes about 30 seconds to load the page.
Most of that time is “Connecting to…” in Firefox and “Waiting for…” in IE, so it seems to be having a long delay finding the host system. If I reload the page and/or browser to another page, it takes just as long for every page.
If I use Safari/Chrome/Firefox on the host system to access localhost:8888 it runs fine. If I access outside sites on the VirtualBox system (including an exact copy of the same website on an outside server) it runs fine. The lengthy delay only occurs when I try to access the host’s WordPress site from the VM.
Host: Mac OSX Snow Leopard, MAMP Pro (Apache) on port 8888 running WordPress.
VM: Windows 7 accessing with Firefox 9 and Internet Explorer 9.
Any ideas?
I found the problem, but I thought I ought to leave this here in case others encounter the same thing:
In my case, the problem was a WordPress plugin called “cforms”. The plugin has a bug where it tries to load its CSS files without the correct port, so it was trying to load //domain/path/cforms.css instead of //domain:8888/path/cforms.css. The 30 second delay was just the browser timeout for those files.
The problem didn’t occur when loading the copy of the site on an outside server because it was just the default port 80. I’m not sure why the site still loaded quickly when loading //localhost:8888, but that’s irrelevant.