Since setting up my development environments on Mac OS X Lion (brand new macbook air purchased in January 2012), I have noticed that resolving to a virtual host is very slow (around 3 seconds) the first time but after that is fast as long as I continue loading it regularly.

If I leave it untouched for a couple of minutes and then reload again, the first reload is (again) painfully slow; seems like something is being cached. 

As can be seen below I am not using the .local TLD.

My setup: Apache 2 - MySQL - PHP installed and enabled - added a couple of virtual hosts one of which I created for localhost

My /etc/hosts:

```
127.0.0.1       localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost
fe80::1%lo0     localhost
127.0.0.1       myproject.dev
::1             myproject.dev
fe80::1%lo0     myproject.dev

```

My virtual host set-up in username.conf: 

```
NameVirtualHost *:80

<Directory "/Users/myusername/Sites/">
    Options Indexes MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName localhost
    DocumentRoot /Users/myusername/Dropbox/dev_envs/
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName myproject.dev
    DocumentRoot /Users/myusername/Dropbox/dev_envs/myprojectname
</VirtualHost>

```
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/10064581', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/61232/']
Ensuring that the host names are defined at the beginning of the file made the difference for me.
By default the line 127.0.0.1 localhost is already at the beginning, just add your entries on the same line.
The trick that did it for me was adding

```
127.0.0.1 locahost

```

on the first line of the host file.

From all my virtual hosts, only the ones using a database were slow. I believe it's because the process of looking up "localhost" for the database connection slowed things down, since I only added the addresses for my virtual hosts and not "localhost" as well. Now it's all snappy again. :)