I'll have to try the bash script on my Mac at home, but I tried the Java applet at http://blog.browsermob.com/2009/12/g...ng-performance at work yesterday. My results are posted at http://blog.browsermob.com/2009/12/g.../#comment-1324, and be sure to read the next two comments, as my first test was screwed up. (I couldn't get the Java applet to work on my Mac, so thanks for the link to the bash script.)

Google DNS appears more consistent (all three tries were almost exactly 58ms), but OpenDNS was able to resolve it faster the second and third tries. My local ISP's servers took more than twice as long as Google to resolve on the first try but were able to give me results in under 15ms the second and third tries.

As I mentioned in my comment to the above-linked thread, I'll stick with OpenDNS at work, but I might look at switching to Google at home--not so much because my ISP has bad response times but more because they recently switched to taking you to a search page if you type in a nonexistent domain. It wouldn't be so bad if it took me to a useful search engine (like Google), but it takes me to some off-brand search engine that provides me with results that are not even close to what I want. (At least OpenDNS uses Yahoo! for search results, although Yahoo! isn't much better than the off-brand engine my ISP uses--honestly, the only search engine that consistently finds what I'm looking for is Google.)

Oh, one downside to using non-ISP DNS servers: CDNs like Akamai and Limelight will return endpoints close to the DNS server rather than close to your machine. This has some negatives: websites that rely on CDNs will load slower (longer ping times to the CDN edge server), and streaming media coming from the CDN can suffer from congestion between your network and the edge server that wouldn't exist if you were loading from the closest edge server (good CDNs often have edge servers that peer directly with or are even collocated at most ISPs).

This may not be a big deal if you are located somewhat close to an OpenDNS or Google Public DNS server, but it can be an issue for us 49th- and 50th-state residents, not to mention people whose closest OpenDNS or Google Public DNS server is on another continent!

Oh, and to the OP: "DNS servers" is actually not redundant, since DNS officially stands for "Domain Name System," not "Domain Name Server," although that is a common misconception. ;)

the java thing is a much better test, I think. My results are right below yours.

http://blog.browsermob.com/2009/12/g.../#comment-1338

You can see how ridiculously slow Hawaiiantel is there. As soon as I tried the opendns server yesterday, I could feel the difference immediately in a way the numbers don't really show, except for test 1 with my ISP.

-David

Wow--even the best of those results is...bad!

I guess there's a price to pay for living in paradise... ;)

For being under the frozen tundra and all that, Alaska is actually a pretty wired state. Our two ISPs have spent large sums of money laying some very fast fiber between us and the Pacific Northwest. (One is here.) Part of the lower response time is the lesser distance from Anchorage to Seattle (~1500 miles, compared to ~2500 miles from Hawaii), but a 66% increase in distance shouldn't cause a 300% increase in ping time!

the first hop to my gateway is pretty slow as well. I guess it must be faster for the people on Oahu?

The route to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 goes over some at&t path, and is slower than this one. The qwest route seems to be the fastest one.

Anyway, that's why I was so surprised that my actual experience would be much better using opendns than the ISPs name server. But it is.

I guess I should thank PTravel for starting the thread, even though my improvements have nothing to do with Google's DNS servers.

Jackal: Thanks for reminding to try opendns.

-David

Just for comparison's sake, here's my trace to OpenDNS and Google Public DNS: from work:

And from home:

Something was obstructing the path to OpenDNS (I couldn't even get Layer 4 Traceroute to pass that with lft -E), but you can see my ping times to the first Seattle hop are much better (almost half!) than your first onshore hop (Burbank), but as you say, it appears to be more of an issue between you and that first hop (72.234.40.1) than from Hawaii to the mainland (a 49ms difference between the HNL edge router and the BUR core router is much more in line with the 2,500-mile distance to the West Coast and is relatively similar to my 33ms difference between the edge of ACS's Alaska network and their Seattle POP--the packets are both traveling at about 50,000 miles per second! :D).

I use UltraDNS.

I guess nobody saw my posts back in January or even this most recent one a few days ago.. Especially ya'll reading THAT thread

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/13422445-post19.html


:-)

When I entered the value "8" in the first DNS field, it gave an error "invalid value".

I've installed the Lenovo Access Connection utility and I can enter any value now.

I can't imagine why it would have done that. I've set up two of my Win7 machines to use 8.8.8.8 without difficulty. Did you hit RETURN after entering the first 8? That would take you to the next entry, rather than the next field, and would probably return that error. Instead, use the TAB key, position the cursor with the mouse, or enter "008," and the cursor will automatically move to the next field.