How to speed up your Surfing!
Today while I was happily browsing away; the internet stopped. Although it was not surprising (with comcast you are never surprised), what was interesting though was that pinging a website like linkedin.com was not working but pinging an ip address was.
This usually means that the thing which converts the address you type in your browser into a physical address of the machine hosting the website was not working properly. This phonebook sortta entity is called DNS. Although it was a temporary outage, I did some digging around and found out exactly how slow my internet provider's DNS are.
There is this wonderful open source software called namebench which will find out the speeds of DNS servers accessible to your computer. I ran this on my computer and here are the results:
As you can see here, both Comcast DNS servers are extremely slow (211 ms and 264 ms) as compared to other servers like Google's DNS. Infact they are 13 to 30% slower. NTT-2 is the fastest DNS server here, although I don't know if I will switch to it, since the webpage is not in English.
Most websites are made of many scripts/css/html pages, which require more than one (around 5-6 lookups) for initial loading. So if my DNS server is 80 ms slower, it means my initial page load is delayed by atleast half a second with default DNS servers.
So a simple way to increase your speed is to switch to another DNS provider. It is usually very simple and instructions are here. Note that this won't increase your download speeds, just the time to see a fresh website load up.
Happy Surfing!
Engineering Leader
9 年Thats very true Tin
Principal DevOps Engineer at Obsidian Security
9 年Be careful which DNS server you pick to use. An untrusted DNS server will open you up for MITM (Man-in-the-middle) attack. Make sure you know, really know who run those DNS servers that you chose. Many ISPs practices DNS hijacking, e.g. they redirect unknown domains to their own Ads services and/or collecting statistics.
Engineering Leader
10 年Shubhanshu: I don't know if the DDoS prevention should get triggered with 250 or so requests.
Engineering leadership @ Databricks
10 年Deepank Gupta I also noticed similar thing but during the course of googling found out that Comcast slows down ping response time from external tools to protect against DDoS. Not sure if that applies to namebench. Joshua Hartman Chrome does its own DNS caching. At this point I think they are pretty much bypassing the whole OS network stack.
Engineering Leader
10 年Joshua yeah it does but not too sure about 1 though. On chrome dev tools with no cache for linkedin and facebook login page i see 3 serial lookups which dont hit cache (greater than 5 ms)