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How Does the New Google DNS Perform? (and Why?)
Tarinth writes "Google just announced its new Google DNS platform. Many have viewed this as a move to increase ad revenue, or maybe capture more data. This article explores those questions, as well as the actual benchmarking results for Google DNS — showing that it is faster than many, but not nearly as fast as many others." We also recently discussed security implications of the Google Public DNS.
Its funny how the Google hype is driving so much talk about something like DNS, a service which probably 95% of non-tech people don't know exists. Most people
wouldn't care about DNS normally, but since its Google it must be something to get excited about. I doubt really that any significant number of people will
switch to using 8.8.8.8, but I worry that if they do, one of the the original goals for DNS will be lost. That its distributed.
Just ask yourself one question, if you don't trust your internet provider enough to do DNS correctly, should you trust them at all?
quite like it.
It's slightly faster then my ISP's DNS (Virgin Media) but to be honest not a whole lot.
The main reason I started to use Google DNS is that I trust them more with information then I do with Virgin Media (Richard Branson) , it probably won't make a big difference but at least it makes me feel better that I got one up on them.
This just in, Google is average at something they did. Google's parents are very upset and will not be posting this on their refrigerator. In other news, detractors of Google throw party.
Resolve www.yahoo.com
local.isp 12msec
4.2.2.2 30msec
208.67.222.222 55msec
8.8.8.8 57msec
if it makes satellite web browsing better. Setting a web proxy is a great way to cut down DNS chatter on a satellite link, perhaps Google have come up with something that is almost as good.
Nullius in verba
Around 5 years ago, the internet was down for comcast subscribers in northern Indiana and a good chunk of the midwest- I figured out it was just their DNS servers that were down and quickly switched over to AT&T's. That evening I saw the fastest internet I've ever seen. It was glorious.
I ran my own set of experiments benchmarking both Google DNS and OpenDNS as well as two UK ISPs. I showed more detailed results, and infer some information about how these systems are run. http://bramp.net/blog/google-dns-benchmarked
What do they use for software... bind? djbdns? Something they wrote themselves in python?
Oh look. It's THIS thread again.
Use google DNS: a good way to beat RCNs DNS throttling.
I un-crippled my internet access by using it.
Open DNS servers have been there all along, but they're too obscure for Joe Average. Google is not, and there is embarrassement ahead for several national censorship schemes.
Was considering a switch (for our locally cached DNS servers parent servers), but glad I ran a benchmark first:
Cached relative performance:
Uncached relative performance:
In all cases, Google's one of our slower options. If anything, it appears I'd be best off using local DNS backed by level 3 for non-cached results.
My ISP's nameservers are broken. Whenever I try to resolve a name that doesn't exist, instead of the DNS server telling me it doesn't exist, it returns the address of one of my ISP's web servers, which presents me with an ad-laden search page for whatever name I typed in. This is clearly not what the DNS spec says it is supposed to do.
While this might not sound like such a big deal, for developers it's a pain in the butt. For one thing, if I want to test to see if, for example, a name I have registered has propagated, I can't just do an nslookup to see if I get a response; I have to actually verify that the address that is returned (since all lookups will resolve to something) is the actual correct address instead of my ISP's web server. Also, on the client side, when my applications communicate via the web, they have to not only verify that an address resolved, but actually verify with the back-end application that it is what it's supposed to be instead of an ISP's search page. Just since I changed my DNS servers last week, I've already saved at least a minute or two I shouldn't have had to spend in the first place.
Plus, even if all of that still doesn't convince you that Google is actually doing something helpful, there's the simple fact that my ISP's servers actually had on average an hour or so down time every couple of months. It wasn't scheduled or anything (that I know of, anyway), I would just all of a sudden not be able to resolve any addresses. If I called technical support, the goobs there would insist on me plugging my computer directly into their modem, and when it still wouldn't work, they'd schedule a time a few days out for a technician to come out to my house. They simply wouldn't acknowledge that the problem was on their end, not mine, and they didn't understand simple concepts like nslookups, tracerts, etc. I'd invariably just give up, tell them not to send anyone, and wait without Internet access for their network people to figure it out after a lot more people called in.
I started using OpenDNS a long time ago because of all of the problems with my ISP's DNS servers, even though they also redirect queries that aren't found to their search page. If I wanted other features OpenDNS offers like parental controls and such, I'd probably stay with them. As it is, though, consider me another happy consumer of another helpful Google service. As the informal tech support guy for most of my family and friends, I'll be switching as many of them over as I can too, so I can avoid just a few more "Hey, I can't get to the Internet" calls.
Essentially it showed that the ones from verizon (the one that provides him connection) are the fastest ones (not only the fios one, but the 151.202/3 ones too are from verizon), there are a few others faster than Googles (including 4.2.2.*), and then the rest of DNS tested were slower. Much of the speed that matters of a well installed DNS is how "close" is from you (as in i.e. ping time), and your upstream provider have usually the closest one.
Could be a speed improvement in the few, rare times when you ask for something that is not cached already, but in massively used DNSs that is something rare and usually one-time hit. If you have to choose them for something, speed should not be the main factor.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'll stick with my ISP's DNS. One thing I've noticed about using third party DNS services like OpenDNS is that location aware sites that serve up content from different servers depending where you are (like YouTube) don't work well.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
It can be two things.
I suspect this has been asked before. Is there some way to set up multiple DNS servers and simply query them in parallel?
That way whichever one is fastest gets me the address sooner. It is a little bit rude, but since it would seem that most DNS providers have the opportunity to be shady and feed landing pages or collect usage data, they'd be just as happy to have me make a request and discard the answer.
This is my completely unfounded conspiracy theory, but I'm starting to see Google as a pretty clever rouse to capture user data, perhaps for our government? They provide great services, but they've got their hooks well sunk into much of our digital lives.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well I, for one, welcome our new "Do No Evil" DNS overlords...
In Soviet Russia, Google DNS names YOU!
I wonder if they redirect misspelled entries here
In Korea, only old people use their ISP's DNS.
itsatrap!
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
...and am very happy with it. i surf a lot from the console and really am sick of getting redirected to opendns' website instead of a standard compliant answer...it seems to be a little bit faster than opendns, but i'm really too lazy to measure it. i cache with pdnsd localy since three years, because really every isp i had sucked at dns (5 hours dns downtime a month is 5 hours too much for me!). however, the arguments regarding privacy are just masturbation - you know you're security wanker without a web of trust and there's no trust in unencrypted udp connections and you don't own google's (or anybody else's) log server, do you? :-)
For me, like the tester, OpenDNS (17-18ms) performed better than Google (25ms). My ISP (O2 in UK - 22ms) was somewhere in between OpenDNS and Google.
For those who want to test it themselves, you can do so quite easily under linux. The Command to use is dig
e.g.
dig @server slashdot.org
Do it a few time to see how fast your DNS server actually is.
What's under yellowstone?
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog entry entitled "Google - The New Mark of the Beast" and was fluffled off as an alarmist. Now the truth about Google is slowly seeping out. For those of you who don't do data mining, you just don't realize how sophisticated its become. Google doesn't do anything unless it gets them another stream of data on their user base.
Gmail - your email - subject -content - to and from
Google Chat - content and other people
Google Latitude - your physical location and cell #
Google Voice - your phone number (which can be trivially tied to real identity including your address) as well as the content from your phone calls and messages
Google Docs - Your documents, power points, and spreadsheets
Google Chrome & Toolbar - Your browsing History
Google Search - if you're logged in this gets stored if not, it can still be tied back to you via IP address
With Google DNS, they can see what you're requesting even if you're not one of their users and they can start to build a profile on you even if you haven't signed up.
HDGary secures my bank
If your ISP is running a flakey DNS server, use your own.
It took me 5 minutes to get the dns recursor that comes with powerdns to work with my windows system at work.
download "powerDNS for windows" http://www.powerdns.com/en/downloads.aspx
turn off "powerDNS" in services
edit recursor.conf in powerdns home directory (looks like the default is c:\program files\powerdns)
change recursor port to 53 (default is 5300)
turn on "powerDNS recursor" service
edit your IP configuration to use localhost for DNS.
Now, you're doing DNS all by yourself. All there rest of the DNS servers on the planet can fail as long as a root server and the server of the service you're attempting to find work, you'll be good to go.
Oh -- and if you're at some place with split-horizon DNS, you'll now not see any of the internal services...
Too bad that I can't use the Google DNS service on places that I would definitively use it. Those places are coffe's free WiFi hotspots, store free hotspots etc.. Usually, on those places the domain resolving is very slow (either done by their crappy router or forwarded to their crappy ISP). The problem is that most of them block all outgoing UDP traffic which invalidates the use of non-local DNS servers.
but never tought about it dns performance before and it showed one thing tough and that is that my local crappy router sucks . for windows users , try this one http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm The googgle dns servers performs "ok" , but for me atleast i noticed noticable difference by using my isp dns servers directly.( not by just looking what this prog gave me , but cache lookups is faster on my ISP than on my local router( yah i know my router sucks ) ) ( oh btw , you cant use ping latency to determine if a dns is faster or not )
Google still can't get the POP3 protocol to work correctly in Gmail and here they are playing with bind. You know Microsoft must giggle when they hear Google setup their own DNS servers for the public. Give me a break Google hype machine. I feel like going and looking for another search engine.
It's called Anycast and it is used to route your packet addressed to 8.8.8.8 (e.g.) to the topologically closest of many hosts claiming that IP on the internet. I assume, but don't know, that Google has a network widespread enough with diverse enough interconnects to the internet that there's plenty of redundancy and resiliency there. I assume likewise for OpenDNS; they can't be serving those billions of requests per day from an old BSD box under the desk, like I did for my employer back in the early days.
Google offering free DNS makes sense for everybody:
a) it is a low cost / low bandwidth service Google can integrate into its infrastructure for negligible cost, and the public get free reliable DNS
b) ISPs are 'stealing' search traffic by hijacking millions of misspelled domains, Google can try and eliminate this fraud which will more than cover the costs of (a)
c) why do people need to invent a (c)?
At the end of the day, Google's money-spinner is ads on search results. The free DNS is a move to protect this. As people write above, a bonus side-effect is that makes life easier for developers of sites and browsers when ISPs don't corrupt the RFCs.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Coming as this did hot on the heels of an article about a new RNA discovery, when I first read the title I thought it was about Google inventing a new type of DNA. Now that would be newsworthy!
For international users (I'm from Brazil), the new Google DNS is awesome. There are no such services around here and we usually need to rely on our ISPs DNS servers, which can't be trusted to be updated and with security holes fixed.
I used OpenDNS, but the response times were around 140ms, which is noticeably slower than my own ISPs DNS servers.
Now it seems Google has local DNS servers in Brazil, so I get 20-30ms response times which is much better. Actually, it's better than a lot of you are getting from Google's DNS servers, which makes me think Google has room for improvement in the US.
Did not found way to force system resolver to use tcp-only, but something like this should work: /etc/pdnsd.conf === /etc/resolv.conf ===
aptitide install pdnsd
=== cut
global {
query_method = tcp_only;
}
server {
ip = 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4;
label = "google";
}
=== cut
nameserver 127.0.0.1
That's slower than udp, but better than nothing (and pdnsd cache will compensate slowdown from tcp usage).
Anything can be used for good and evil. Not to sound like a Google fanboy, but by setting default primary/secondary DNS to a hardened, cache poison (and other stuff) secured and properly maintained DNS service, their ChromeOS / Android / people-who-trust-them customers could be better off than relying on some unsecured local ISP DNS.
If I was paranoid (or had a reason), I would trust Google more than my ISP - my ISP's DNS belongs to my ISP. Which is subject to my country's law. Google is not, and getting any info from them is at least bit harder than asking local company - who also does not have a clear policy on logging and sharing my data.
And yes, in my case also its fast but not as local ISP DNS, but no big trade off since I use BIND to cache anyway. So primary and secondary are my ISP's, and tertiary and quadriary Google's.
What I learned from all this is that second(ary) DNS IP your ISP gives you is sometimes bit (lot?) faster, and better used as Primary DNS under Windows.
It's funny how a lot of people are falling all over themselves because google introduces something new. Now they've introduced a new DNS service and say it's to make the internet experience faster. Turns out in benchmarks they are slower than peoples ISP DNS servers (not really surprising), but also significantly slower than services like OpenDNS, which does the same thing. So why are people switching to google??? It's not better than existing services, there's serious privacy and security concerns (it's a lot easier to force one company to change their DNS records than forcing thousands of companies in lots of different countries to change their records), but still everybody is suddenly declaring "I'm switching to googleDNS". The scary thing is the people are not the typical fanboys, but usually sceptical geeks. Somehow though as soon as google does something it switches the scepticism off in a geek brain.
Good catch, I thought DNS only used TCP for zone transfers and similar.
TCP DNS query with dig:
dig +tcp @8.8.8.8 www.slashdot.org
Linux /etc/resolv.conf seems not to be able to do DNS queries over TCP. However, *BSD can:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=resolv.conf&sektion=5
=== cut /etc/resolv.conf ===
nameserver 8.8.8.8
options tcp
Still, most of free WiFi hotspots block every f**king port except 80 and 443. I didn't check but if Google is answering DNS queries on 80 and 443 then it is a good thing :)
I don't know how difficult is to setup on Windows world, but on Linux/Unix world is fairly simple (In Ubuntu, 1 apt-get and modify your dns server to localhost).
You will not benefit from the cache of others, but the hit ratio appart of the big ones must be very low anyway. Better roll your own cache with your own browsing habits.
What's the problem with that?
in the form of easy to remember IP addresses.
Additionally its a DNS service.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I just want to point out the obvious reason google is doing this and hoping you will switch DNS to them.
Facts:
1. Some ISP's return advertisments when you enter a domain that does not exists.
2. Google makes money from online advertising.
3. There is a specific number of dollars advertisers are willing to budget each year.
Given the above, it seems clear that google is attempting to remove the advertising dollars spent on domain-misses. By doing so, there is more money spent on other channels of online advertising. Google will likely pick up the majority of that money since they offer one of the best suites for online advertising.
The ability for a user to get more accurate DNS results... is the cookie that google is holding out in order to get you to switch.
Also note: about once per year my ISP goes down due to DNS not working. I can get to internet sites via their IP number, but name resolution does not work. The next time this occurs, I will be switching to 8.8.8.8 until my local ISP gets their DNS fixed. I may or may not switch back after that.
Good luck google ;-)
I think you have more or less formulated the ONLY viable argument for Google DNS: as a hardened service for their OWN software.
I won't use it because I don't want to provide more data to Google (ditto for not using Chrome, FF works better for me), but I'm not dissing the service itself - it depends on your tolerance for risk, and of your need for a DNS. I'd use OpenDNS in that case.
Insert
..but not faster than the DNS service I run on my computer. It is trivial to install, provides a very simple service, and is as flexible as I might want it to be. A personal note on networking in general: whoever steps into the Internets and does not run a resolver that allows recursive queries should be banned.
> your telephone company makes $3,155,692,600,000 a year from time-metered services?
I don't know about them actually getting it, but for some reason, I have no trouble imagining them billing that much...
Dear Google - If you want to speed up the web as you so claim, and you're genuine in your interest, why is this not Free Software? Why are Google Wave and Google Android (both easily more profitable if closed up!) open platforms, but not this one (NOT profitable regardless of closed/open nature)? There is *NO* way you can compete with the last-mile (ISP) caching servers with respect to latency, so the only advantage comes from your minor optimization tweaks.
If you share these tweaks with the world, we can (a) see your transparency and your genuine interest in speeding up the net without so obviously gaining more data and --more importantly-- (b) the lower-latency last-mile providers such as ISPs, datacenters, and IT departments can actually deploy your superior technology in places where it matters.
In fact, the only place I can see using open DNS servers with benefit are when there are other freedom-related issues (censorship in specific), which of course lends itself to needing more transparency anyway!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Not being able to translate a site's domain name to its IP address has nothing to do with not being able to access the site.
Yes it does.
Very few---counting cards---people can---counting cards---remember the IP addresses of all the---counting cards---sites they want to---counting cards---visit.
Even though there are ways around it, it does work against many people.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Nothing new? Why this post is here? http://x7.fi/2009/12/04/google-public-dns-benchmarking/ Check it out.
Do I want Google pawing through my DNS lookups to build a better profile of me? No, but I'd rather have that than Charter forcing a page of advertising instead of a NXDOMAIN response. They say you can opt out, but all that does is cause their system to send you a fake IE error page instead of a page of advertising. I switched to Google's DNS a couple of days ago and it's fast and reliable. All in all, it's a good solution.
They appear to be harvesting ever more information about us. Where do we draw the line??... "Google CCTV Home Security", "Google Banking Services", "Google Medical Records". But perhaps they don't need to go this far so long as we all adopt their new Chrome OS!!!
You can run DNS Benchmark to check the speed DNS servers.
Interesting! We also ran an experiment, but from 42 locations instead, using the WatchMouse network. In our synthetic score OpenDNS also comes out best:
http://labs.watchmouse.com/2009/12/public-dns-servers-performance-worth-the-trouble/
The problem we see is that Google is pretty fast, but they also seem to lose quite some packets in the process, causing retries etc...
Google's public DNS service is fast, but also exhibits the most time-outs when measuring performance from 42 locations world-wide. When taking these time-outs into account, OpenDNS may well be the best option for your location in terms of total DNS waiting time. Check it out here: http://labs.watchmouse.com/2009/12/public-dns-servers-performance-worth-the-trouble/.