On 1/1/2014 12:27 AM, Felix Miata wrote:
My web browsers often seem to spend a lot of time reporting "looking up host <blah>". I'd like to see less of that in 2014, and spend less time watching nothing happen in the browser's viewport.
http://www.edwin.io/optimized-resolv-conf seems to make sense, but it includes no discussion of a local nameserver, such as the one typically enabled by default in an internet router, only using Google IPs. Anyone have anything to add or dispute what it says?
Are those using routers better off using the one it includes? Better off avoiding?
Is there any convenient way to evaluate average response times from various servers?
Are there logical reasons for avoiding Google's or other high visibility servers?
Are there reasons why the servers provided by the ISP subscribed to shouldn't be preferred?
Can anyone explain why the default timeout is 5s and not more or less? Is it a holdover from times past when the internet was less busy, and often less speedy via dialup or ISDN instead of broadband?
If you EVER see "looking up host" then, Yes, you have a problem, and yes you should consider using some other servers. I often see waiting for......, but never looking up.... I can't remember the last time I saw that for a site that ultimately resolved. If I do, its because I fat-fingered they keyboard while typing a url. I subscribe to opendns.com, (they have a free service). It is very fast. I have a fall back (secondary) of 8.8.8.8 (google). I think it has fallen over to google's server maybe once in all the years I've been using them, and that was for a scheduled outage. Their servers are fast, at least as fast as googles. My ISP is spotty, sometimes very good but other times their servers become slow. My prior ISP was simply terrible. That's what lead me to look for alternatives. I run my own in-house DNS server on opensuse, because I have a split horizon for office machines. Other wise, I would just code openDNS's IPs into the router, which is what I do at home. All my machines just point to my in-house server or the router for DNS, and that means I only have to change the settings in one place. Opendns allows me to block a bunch of web ad servers so that I don't have to run ad block on every browser on every machine. Every once in a while I will reverse the order of the DNS servers to see the difference, and Google's servers are very fast, the the amount of ads on web pages goes up by a lot because they don't offer blocking. Where I really notice this is on tablets and smartphones. What I block via opendns is those ad agencies that underline random words on any page and trigger pop-ups each time your mouse crosses them. All of these creep through Google's servers, but not opendns. The other reason I avoid Google is that I have no clue what they are doing with that data. As for why you would avoid your ISP's router, you answered that question before you asked it, because you should never see "looking up" messages in a browser. Ever. (Well, ok, maybe on dial-up). The time out of 5 seconds is traditional, and probably no longer warranted, but falling over to your second server starts the process all over again, and there is no reason to believe the secondary will be faster than the primary, since people usually put the fastest boxes as primary and the older boxes as secondaries. Forcing premature fail-over to secondaries can be counter productive. (This is not a concern if your secondary is a different system, such as google). Option Rotate does not always work (not honored by many systems, most small routers, etc). -- _____________________________________ ---This space for rent--- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org