twi.gs

Everyone is talking about the Google Public DNS. Faster tubes are always nice and Google hasn’t lead us astray yet (except for that use our servers for your javascript files because then they’ll be fast cause they’re cached. That was really slow and sucked.)

Well most name servers cache, probably all but we’ll play it safe. I use Xmission for my tube connectivity and it’s only 2 actual hops to get to their name server (198.60.22.2). I also happen to know they cache. OpenDNS has been providing free public DNS and let you have fine grain control over which domains you’re allowed to visit. You could block porn sites if you wanted. They cache too. Now we have the Google providing DNS for us. They already know what we search for and what we talk about, just as well let them mine data for what websites we’re going to, right?

Well, faster tubes are faster tubes so which one should you pick?

I ran dig unitedcareerservices.com @198.60.22.2|grep time a few times and came up with these results, discarding the first to ensure that the look up was cached upstream.

;; Query time: 77 msec
;; Query time: 79 msec
;; Query time: 82 msec
;; Query time: 83 msec
For and average of 80.25 msec.

For OpenDNS:
Query time: 73 msec
Query time: 87 msec
Query time: 99 msec
Query time: 94 msec
For and average of 88.25msec.

And for Google:
;; Query time: 134 msec
;; Query time: 98 msec
;; Query time: 126 msec
;; Query time: 138 msec
For and average of 109.0 msec.

What’s the moral of the story? Odds are your ISP has enough users to have cached most of the popular domains you visit. They also have something Google won’t have: A close proximity to you in the network. This means you’re probably still better off using your ISP’s default name servers.