After at least 14 hours of browsing in Ubuntu on the MacBook with pdnsd turned on, my conclusion is that I just cannot at all see any evidence for faster browsing. Honestly, to me it looks exactly the same, no slower and no faster.
And yes, I am sure that pdnsd is running and the selected DNS server is 127.0.0.1. Here's what I get from nslookup:
$ nslookup google.com
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: google.com
Address: 64.233.167.99
Name: google.com
Address: 72.14.207.99
Name: google.com
Address: 64.233.187.99
So, this is disappointing. Nevertheless, given that pinging my usual DNS servers only took 65 ms, that doesn't provide much leeway for speeding up page retrieval.
I'm really going to have to try and find out if others REALLY are getting faster browsing?
On the same topic, here are two interesting articles from SourceForge. The first covers how DNS works in Linux and the second looks at a more elaborate local DNS server setup for the purpose of, yes, speeding up browsing.
I can see quite a bit of evidence though. If you notice Firefox goes from displaying "Connecting ..." "Connected to..."" and "Transferring..." straight to
ReplyDelete"Transferring...". It takes about 200ms for me to reach the ISP DNS server. The network cached DNS gives it to me in 1 ms or 2ms. I set up squid to use the DNS cache for all computers. The local DNS cache does it for me in 0ms most of the time. I also use longer time to live and cache size settings.
One of the best examples of seeing DNS caching work in action is to visit: http://maps.google.com
Also try these commands:
dig @127.0.0.1 www.google.com
dig @YOUR DNS SERVER www.google.com
If you don't notice speeds ups, check whether you have /etc/resolv.conf modified to use
nameserver 127.0.0.1 as the first entry.
If you're using DHCP you can add (or uncomment) this line in
/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf:
prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
@Yesudeep
ReplyDeleteThanks for that comment and the useful details you posted.
However, I'm not saying that there is no scientifically discernible difference. Yes, there is. But, in my case were talking about 60-65 ms per browse. Basically, this will NOT lead to anybody genuinely perceiving that browsing is in any way faster.There are, of course, many elements contibuting to how fast a page shows up including besides how fast the url is converted to an address, how fast it comes in from the server and then how fast it renders.
In my case, given that I can ping my normal DNS server in 65ms, any browsing speed-up by eliminating this delay is absolutely minimal and all but indiscernible.