DNS -> double internet speed

[Pedro3]

Hello…

 

Can someone comment on this article?

https://www.lifewire.com/double-internet-speed-with-one-settings-change-2377750?utm_campaign=computersl&utm_medium=email&utm_source=cn_nl&utm_content=10410259&utm_term=

 

I think this is bogus, but, is there some special cases where this can be true or is 100% b**?

[jnelsoninjax]

5 minutes ago, Pedro3 said:

Hello…

 

Can someone comment on this article?

https://www.lifewire.com/double-internet-speed-with-one-settings-change-2377750?utm_campaign=computersl&utm_medium=email&utm_source=cn_nl&utm_content=10410259&utm_term=

 

I think this is bogus, but, is there some special cases where this can be true or is 100% b**?

I would say bogus as well, I have run the exact program mentioned and yes there might be faster DNS servers, but you are not going to magically increase your speed by 100% by changing the DNS server. I'm going to page @BudMan for confirmation of what I am thinking here, and @warwagon just because it is a GRC program and he might have insight as well!

[neufuse Veteran]

this is just an ad to convince people to use google DNS instead of their ISP so google can watch what you go to even easier...

 

yes DNS could slow you down some if you have a horrible one but it wont double your speed, once it's resoved a DNS entry it generally caches it in local dns cache... and some ISP's have very fast DNS servers, comcast for example for me is about 30ms faster then googles 8.8.8.8 resolving hundreds of DNS queries in a benchmark test... not much but still faster... but a normal person doesn't do this

[+Warwagon MVC]

Well, I don't know about doubling your speed, but improving the speed of DNS lookup does help.

 

Think about it, DNS is a phone book of the web. Lets imagine that it's not automatic and that you had to yell across the room for someone to look up in the site you wanted to go to and give you the phone number (ip address).

 

The first person we have is Timmy. "HEY TIMMY WHAT'S THE PHONE NUMBER FOR NEOWIN.NET!" ... Timmy responds .. "54.173.39.38".... "THANKS TIMMY!"

 

The second person we have is your grandma "HEY GRANDMA WHAT IS THE PHONE NUMBER FOR NEOWIN.NET?" ...

 

Grandma "WHAT WAS THAT SONNY i CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" 

 

You "WHAT .......IS ........THE.......PHONE NUMBER FOR NEOWIN.NET?"...

 

Grandma "....."Home number???

 

You "Phooooooooooooone number"

 

Grandma "54.173.39.38"

 

You knew the address you were trying to get to but the time it takes to access the phone book of the web to give you the correct IP address can drastically speed up how pages load. Now it might not be twice as fast, but if you have a ###### DNS server, switching to a faster one will make a difference.

 

That is what the GRC Benchmark tool does. Just imagine it yelling out "what is the phone number for neowin.net?" to hundreds of different DNS servers and it benchmarks the speed at which each one responds and ranks them accordingly.

 

While the computer does cache the DNS results for future use, thus speeding up the site loading on future visits, for first-time visits it will still be slower on a slow dns server.

 

I overly simplified it in case a regular non-techy stumbled upon this thread. 

 

[+BudMan MVC]

4 hours ago, warwagon said:

but improving the speed of DNS lookup does help.

Much of this is myth and FUD.. Sure going from say dns that does not respond at all or cuts your time from say 200ms to 10ms could help..  But keep in mind that once you look up something its cached - in multiple places.  Your router is going to cache it, your machine is going to cache it and the browser itself will cache it for the length of the TTL..

 

So unless your going to sites with a ttl of 60 seconds or something your not going to have to ask your dns server again for quite some time.  For sure not the session your working with once you have gone to the site..  So yes Most sites have multiple FQDN involved, many might even be different domains.  Ads for example could be off different domains completely..  But in general even going to something like neowin where they might have images served from images.neowin.com and forum from forums.neowin.net and new and comments and whatever you could have quite a few hosts/subdomains involved in loading the page.  Once those are looked up they will be cached for the length of the ttl.  So unless you got your info at the very end of the ttl from where you go it, and have to look it up again.  Once you have gone to a site you are not normally going to be looking anything up for that site again until maybe later that day or tmrw even, etc.

 

Thinking your going to speed anything up going from a dns that returns in 30ms vs 60ms even is just nonsense.. 60ms is .06 of a second..  So going from .06 to .03 seconds is not something anyone is ever going to notice and sure and the hell is not going to be 100% of speed increase.  Sure cutting your time from 60 to 30 is a 100% reduction in lookup time.. But its meaningless time that your not going to be able to notice in the big picture.

 

Now if your isp dns is crap any you get timeouts doing lookups and or it takes 100's of ms to get a response from them on every query.  And you move over to something that gives you normal ranges of under 100ms then you might notice that your pages start loading snappier, etc..  But once it has loaded once - dns is really no longer involved until the TTL of that lookup expires.

 

I do not even forward my lookups any more - I run a resolver. So I get the info always from the horses mouth, never from some dns caching server like google or open, etc.  Here is the thing... So when I query www.neowin.net

 

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.neowin.net.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.neowin.net.         21548   IN      CNAME   neowin.net.
neowin.net.             8       IN      A       54.172.165.25
neowin.net.             8       IN      A       54.86.19.37
neowin.net.             8       IN      A       54.173.39.38

;; Query time: 32 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Wed Aug 23 14:21:04 CDT 2017
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 105

 

32ms or .032 seconds.  If I ask their NS directly only takes 13 ms

 

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.neowin.net.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.neowin.net.         21600   IN      CNAME   neowin.net.
neowin.net.             60      IN      A       54.86.19.37
neowin.net.             60      IN      A       54.173.39.38
neowin.net.             60      IN      A       54.172.165.25

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
neowin.net.             172800  IN      NS      ns-1312.awsdns-36.org.
neowin.net.             172800  IN      NS      ns-1610.awsdns-09.co.uk.
neowin.net.             172800  IN      NS      ns-180.awsdns-22.com.
neowin.net.             172800  IN      NS      ns-917.awsdns-50.net.

;; Query time: 13 msec
;; SERVER: 205.251.192.180#53(205.251.192.180)
;; WHEN: Wed Aug 23 14:20:32 CDT 2017
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 242

 

So in this case its a faster for me to resolve vs asking google   And ask the authoritative NS directly!  But in the big picture your talking ms which is not going to make any real difference other than some lame benchmark..

 

The one thing with neowin, is their NS are being hosted by amazon.  I think that 60 second ttl is amazon wanting to have MORE queries - because they charge per query   while they are doing some round robin load balancing there since they return 3 different IPs for the cname.. unless those IPs are changing all the time its pointless to have such a low TTL other than wanting to increase the number of queries.

 

Notice the ttl on google only 8 seconds, so in 8 seconds will have to do another query for it.  Which again will prob not be full ttl.  When I resolve I will always get the full TTL of the record and have prob few less queries overall then if using a forwarder, etc.

 

In the big picture doing benchmarks to trim a few ms off a query is just utter BS FUD all the way around - and put together by someone that doesn't really get how DNS actually is designed to work.. And it sure and the hell is not going to give you 100% speed increase..

 

 

 

[greenwizard88]

My router was replaced, and since them my internet has been noticeably slower. The only functional difference is I went from using Google DNS to Verizon's.

 

I should probably change it back, I don't know if it's a 2x difference, but it's noticeable at 50/50 speeds.

[Draconian Guppy]

Spoiler

Somewhat related-unrelated.

[+Eternal Tempest MVC]

If you want to benchmark DNS, check out - https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

That being said, it would be hard to get the same tests results two times in a row.

You will find some are reality / consistently fast DNS services, but if you chase the "fastest" you will be changing your DNS daily. 

 

All DNS does is (when connecting to a web site)

Browser / Take me to bing.com
Computer / Asks a DNS server, "What is bing's address"
DNS server / Tells computer bing is at: ###.###.###.###

Computer / Goes to  ###.###.###.###

 

Once your device has the address the internet speed is the slowest among bellow.

Device <-> ISP <-> Cloud (Internet) <-> Destination ISP <-> Destination 

 

 

[adrynalyne]

2 hours ago, greenwizard88 said:

My router was replaced, and since them my internet has been noticeably slower. The only functional difference is I went from using Google DNS to Verizon's.

 

I should probably change it back, I don't know if it's a 2x difference, but it's noticeable at 50/50 speeds.

It shouldn’t be. 

 

That said, I had google dns puke on me last night. I had to fall back to level 3 because most sites I go to weren’t resolving. 

[+BudMan MVC]

I can tell you for fact that googledns was not down.. More you connectivity to the site would be the only issue - which would be your isp problem not googledns.

 

Yup that Type -R sticker adding 65HP is the same thing you will see with changing your dns hehe

[adrynalyne]

1 minute ago, BudMan said:

I can tell you for fact that googledns was not down.. More you connectivity to the site would be the only issue - which would be your isp problem not googledns.

 

Yup that Type -R sticker adding 65HP is the same thing you will see with changing your dns hehe

Then explain why switching to level 3 dns took care of it? I never said it went down. It was taking up to a minute to resolve some sites. 

[xendrome]

1 minute ago, adrynalyne said:

Then explain why switching to level 3 dns took care of it? I never said it went down. It was taking up to a minute to resolve some sites. 

Google DNS is setup so redundant if it was down, then the internet as a whole is having a major issue/attack which would have been all over the news.

 

The issue was likely routes from your ISP to Google were not as good or having an issue and the routes to level 3 dns were not.

[adrynalyne]

4 minutes ago, xendrome said:

Google DNS is setup so redundant if it was down, then the internet as a whole is having a major issue/attack which would have been all over the news.

 

The issue was likely routes from your ISP to Google were not as good or having an issue and the routes to level 3 dns were not.

Fair enough though clearly I wasn’t alone. 

 

http://downdetector.com/status/google/news/152411-problems-at-google-2

[+BudMan MVC]

6 minutes ago, adrynalyne said:

It was taking up to a minute to resolve some sites.

And how exactly did you test this?  Did you do a directed query via say dig or nslookup or host or any other dns tool.. Or did you try and resolve, and it didn't resolve even though you kept trying for minutes.

 

The problem here is most likely a negative cache.  A dns forwarder or client even that tries to ask dns for something and doesn't get a response or gets a NX will not ask that server again until the negative cache has expired normally 5 minutes.

 

Suggest you read the RFC..

 

-----

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2308

7.2 Dead / Unreachable Server (OPTIONAL)

   Dead / Unreachable servers are servers that fail to respond in any
   way to a query or where the transport layer has provided an
   indication that the server does not exist or is unreachable.  A
   server may be deemed to be dead or unreachable if it has not
   responded to an outstanding query within 120 seconds.

   Examples of transport layer indications are:

      ICMP error messages indicating host, net or port unreachable.
      TCP resets
      IP stack error messages providing similar indications to those above.

   A server MAY cache a dead server indication.  If it does so it MUST
   NOT be deemed dead for longer than five (5) minutes.  The indication
   MUST be stored against query tuple <query name, type, class, server
   IP address> unless there was a transport layer indication that the
   server does not exist, in which case it applies to all queries to
   that specific IP address.

-----

 

If you ever have a problem resolving something - its best try and do a direct query via some tool like mentioned above.. Either to the forwarder your using (google in this example) and if that fails then to the actual authoritative NS for the domain in question, etc.

[Farchord]

Okay so let's try to explain how the whole shabang works to explain why a good dns makes the internet faster.

 

First, let's explain what a DNS is. DNS means Domain Name Server. It converts a domain name (i.e. neowin.net) into an IP address.

 

When you visit a website such as, let's say neowin, your browser goes through the following steps:

 

1- Query DNS for the IP of www.neowin.net

 

2- DNS answers the IP back as x.x.x.x

 

3- Browser connects to x.x.x.x and gets the html file. Then stylesheets. Then scripts, and so on.

 

A well configured and load balanced DNS server should usually reply very quickly, making it look seamless. Using your ISP's DNS servers is usually prefered because such a DNS server usually sits inside your Internet Service Provider's infrastructure making it (again, usually) very quick. If your ISP's DNS is overloaded or just plain slow, several hundreds of milliseconds, see several seconds might get added to the loading time of webpages, adding a false sense of slowness.

 

In this case, using an alternative such as OpenDNS (Does it still even exist? Haven't really looked) or Google DNS may help. Even if OpenDNS and Google DNS is not inside your ISP's network, making it a little bit slower, it can sometimes end up being quicker than your ISP's.

 

Note though that not using your ISP's dns can have some drawbacks:

 

Sites using ISP-specific servers, such as Youtube, Netflix should still work but will not use servers optimized for your ISP.

 

EDIT: You can get a bit of a display of the whole process in Google Chrome by loading a website with the Inspector open. Press F12, go to the Network tab, and then load a site. It will show all the elements of the loading phase.

[+BudMan MVC]

21 hours ago, Farchord said:

Sites using ISP-specific servers, such as Youtube, Netflix should still work but will not use servers optimized for your ISP.

Your talking about using a CDN or caching for a specific service in your area or something specific for your ISP..  This is normally based upon geo ip information.  And I while I agree if using a dns not in your area this could cause you to hit a CDN server not in your geographic area which would increase the latency to the data.

 

This another reason while resolver is better, since your getting the info from the authoritative server directly and any geoip info that the owner of the domain has designed will know the IP and therefore area your coming from and hand you the correct location or load balanced CDN to pull their data from.

 

Where you can get into trouble with such a thing is that if using a public forwarder, you are not exactly sure where you get sent and yes geo/ip based info could be not optimal for your IP.  But a service like youtube or netflix you don't really need to have max speed available - you just need to be able to stream it at the quality you want.  So in the big picture unless your trying to hit a server on the other side of the planet you shouldn't have any problems watching your video.

 

In some cases using your ISP caching for a youtube can be a problem as well.. Since they can throttle your connection.. Just google you will find lots of way to make sure you bypass your ISP youtube CDN/Cache for better performance of youtube etc.

 

Spending time trying to speedtest different dns is not going to be a significant difference in your internet "speed" - Yes if your isp dns is crap, then using a different forwarder or just resolving your dns on your own vs using a resolver can solve such problems.

[Anibal P]

On 8/23/2017 at 4:01 PM, Draconian Guppy said:

  Hide contents

Somewhat related-unrelated.

 

That needs updating, just adding the wing gave me 100hp!