Google Public DNS [speed up your browsing]

[Arroz con Pollo]

For those who don't know, whenever you type "facebook.com" into your browser, your computer aks its DNS servers for facebook's address. It asks those servers who facebook is and where it lives on the internet. This can be a huge bottleneck when browsing or using other internet applications. Having a fast DNS is important. This is one of the many many reasons Telefonica sucks. Their DNS servers are garbage. They are slow and often unresponsive making it seem like your internet is down when in reality the DNS servers are down. If you see the status down there in your browser saying something like "looking up facebook.com..." while you're waiting for it to load most likely the DNS server is dead or dying.

Anyway, since I've been in Peru I've been using OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com). They have been great and perhaps I'll go back to them. But now that Google has launched their own DNS it just makes sense they'll be faster. And so far it appears to be the case. You can find their homepage and instructions here: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Changing the DNS on your computer goes beyond the scope of my post and I'm really tired anyway. I just hope those who haven't discovered the life altering experience of using a different DNS server can do so after reading this post.

[scott]

I like the idea, but I am not 100% sold on it... It has some issues as highlighted in the article below.

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/12/google-public-dns-service-not-ideal-for-everyone.ars

I have been using openDNS for quite sometime and it is much better than using Telefonica's DNS servers. I think I will wait a bit and see how it works for others and wait for feedback.

[Kelly]

This last paragraph -

Last but not least, there's the privacy aspect. Two people that I talked to immediately brought this up: "Google already sees enough of my 'Net activity, thankyouverymuch."

was the first thing I thought of after reading AcP's post earlier.

[Esteban]

Kelly,
no offense, but you are just a speck on the google map.

[Kelly]

lol... trust me, I wasn't worried about me - I use a google home page, have gmail, google wave, google reader, 5 or 6 google blogs, picasa... etc etc etc. I couldn't care less what google knows about me

But I know there are some members of this forum who do worry about privacy, and figured there'd be some comments from them sooner or later.

Speaking of Google - if anyone would like an invite to google wave, i've got some left, 1st come 1st serve

[scott]

Google Wave is really cool. I got my invite a few weeks ago. I also LOVE google Voice, I have been using that since September.

I am not worried about the privacy aspect. I looked at my google dashboard the other day, WOW!! I use google a lot. More worried about some of the bugs that might still be lingering as the article points out. Good for many, but not all.

[mtwilson]

Wow, what a difference! I set up the Google DNS and my internet connection screams now. Much faster than Telefuncia. Also, I just started waving and I think it has great potential too. I have invites left as well and if you want to add me to your Wave contacts I am at [email protected]. More the merrier!

[scott]

So I decided to try it out, so far no issues. Seems to be noticeably faster than openDNS and way better than Telescamica. I really despise them, they call at least 2 or 3 times a week trying to sell us something, everything but what we need... more reliable and faster internet. I keep telling to stop wasting money on marketing and fix their broken internet in Pucallpa.

[Alpineprince]

Thanks, noticeably quicker!

[scott]

I found a nifty utility to test which DNS servers are best for you.

The results for me were not surprising, Google won, followed closely by openDNS and ultraDNS.
This one does not seem to be browser dependent, which does matter. The results are only for Internet Explorer V7. Using GoogleDNS, in my case 8.8.4.4 was actually faster than 8.8.8.8.

Telefonica servers were near the bottom, even though, in theory they should be near the top.
You need to add private DNS servers, such as Telefonica and TelMex manually.

Here is a link to the site: http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

It's free and not the only utility for testing. I got about the same results with other DNS speed check software.

I also tried it using: http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ It seems to have many issues and I can’t get it to run properly on any of my machines.

[iron butterfly]

deleted

[Christian Jessen]

Sounds really cool, if it can help improve the slow speeds from Telefonica. I gotta try this out someday soon.

[gerard]

I'm not in Lima right now so have been unable to do any testing myself, but I'm surprised people are seeing such a noticeable improvement as logically using DNS from your own provider should be the fastest method as it involves the fewest hops. Can anyone give the IP addresses of the Telefonica DNS servers they were using that seemed so slow? The ones I use are

DNS 1: 200.48.225.130
DNS 2: 200.48.225.146

[iron butterfly]

Those are the ones I have from Telefonica. did you need the IP also?

[scott]

I think you are missing the point of the original post. Telefonica name servers are very unreliable at best.
Since making the switch to openDNS and then googleDNS, I have not had an instance of my internet going down. I have also noticed a quantifiable speed increase. I am getting about 10-15% faster DL and Upload speeds. Google servers have ranked at the top of my results.

I play World of Warcraft, my latency has dropped from about 900ms to less than 300ms.
This since making the switch from telefonica DNS servers... I would say that is significant.

If you are happy with telefonica, great. We are just offering some potenially useful information.