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Beware of Using Google Or OpenDNS For iTunes
Relayman writes "Joe Mailer wanted to download an iTunes movie recently and his Apple TV told him it would take two hours. When he switched his DNS resolver settings, the download time dropped to less than 20 seconds. Apparently, iTunes content is served by Akamai which uses geolocation based on the IP address of the DNS request to determine which server should provide his content. When you use Google or OpenDNS to resolve the Apple domain name, all the requests to Akamai appear to be coming from the same location and they're all directed to the same server pool, overloading that pool and causing the slow downloads. The solution: be wary of using Google or OpenDNS when downloading iTunes files or similar large files. Use your own ISP's DNS servers instead or run your own resolving DNS server."
This afternoon, I found a tool from Google Code called namebench which tests response times against multiple DNS servers and give recommendations based upon a number of query types. The results returned when checking the 'censorship tests' were interesting. Seems a number of sites (wikileaks, isohunt, stormfront) returned 'incorrect' results across DNS servers. I'm going to try this over the next couple of days and see if any of my browsing speeds improves.
BTW - Remember when Google proposed to modify the DNS protocol to pass on the end-users IP? This is exactly why.
Use your own ISP for DNS.
Do you have any tips for keeping your ISP from directing a "server not found" to one of their crappy ad-ridden search pages? I think that's a major reason people choose DNS servers that aren't at their ISP.