My home system consists of a few computers connected to a switch, which then goes to a wireless router. The wireless router is then connected to a modem, which also has wireless, but that wireless is turned off. There are also a few computers connected over WiFi to the wireless router.

On all systems, there are times when I will attempt to navigate to some page, and will instantly get an error page with the message DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN. This pauses for two or three seconds, then the page loads. If I hit refresh during that pause, then it stays at the error page, and may not load the page even if I wait.

There is no pattern that I can see. This happens on roughly one in five pages, with no predictability as to when it will happen, though it seems to always be on new tabs.

Because it's such a minor nuisance, I haven't bothered looking into it much. There are known causes, but they tend to be due to some DNS issue on the computer. They don't seem to account for this particular behavior, where the error comes up instantly (far faster than any page will load), but then after a pause, it loads the actual page. I found some simple solutions. I don't fully remember them, as it was several months back, but they might have had to do with refreshing some cache. These solutions had no impact whatsoever.

I'm only mildly interesting in solving this, but I'm certainly interested in understanding it, and solving it wouldn't be bad.