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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?
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.
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
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.