In a previous post I discussed the internet and how it works from a high level. The concept of DNS is very much like a phone book, but we can carry the analogy a little further. More on this after the break
DNS servers act a little like you when you are trying to remember people’s names and their phone numbers. You have the people you call most often memorized already. This is called caching, and DNS servers use it to keep the most used URL ready to hand for their users. When they encounter a request that is not cached, then the DNS has to ask an external server to resolve the URL to the ip address. This is a significant amount of time.
Several solutions exist to deal with this latency. One is to have big beefy machines, or to cluster the DNS servers so that it can handle the requests better.
I am discussing these things because Google is offering an interesting thing. They are providing a public DNS service. You can get information about it here.
For most people the settings provided by their Internet Service Provider is okay, but I am one of those people who absolutely must have the fastest possible speed with the equipment I have. (It’s that TechWarrior thing.) I made the change to my DNS at my router, and I did notice a little more zippiness to my browsing.
There are two ways to deal with use the Google Public DNS. You can configure your machine to use the Google Public DNS, or you can configure your router to use the the Google Public DNS. I can’t provide detailed instructions on how to do this, because there are literally infinite configurations out there. If you wish to try this out, then you need to go to the google site and read their very informative set of instructions.
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