Google launches public DNS servers

[N!ck]

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/...ublic-dns.html

When you type www.wikipedia.org into your browser's address bar, you expect nothing less than to be taken to Wikipedia. Chances are you're not giving much thought to the work being done in the background by the Domain Name System, or DNS.

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

Most of us aren't familiar with DNS because it's often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the specific technical improvements we've made in our product documentation and get installation instructions from our product website.

If you're web-savvy and comfortable with changing your network settings, check out the Google Code Blog for detailed instructions and more information on how to set up Google Public DNS on your computer or router.

As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.

Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager

8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are the IPs of their servers.

From what I can tell OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) is faster around Europe (including the UK). In the US it depends on where about you are as to which is quicker and in Asia Google's DNS should be much quicker than OpenDNS.

An advantage to this over OpenDNS is there's no advertising/redirects for an incorrect URL, however there's not of the extra features that OpenDNS has such as being able to filter content and statistics.

Opinions? here's OpenDNS's blog post on the matter: http://blog.opendns.com/2009/12/03/opendns-google-dns/

[Tomm]

Yep, ran the test script I found:

#!/bin/sh
 
for i in "lifehacker.com" "facebook.com" "manu-j.com"  "reddit.com" "tb4.fr" "bbc.co.uk"
do
  for j in "4.2.2.2" "8.8.8.8" "208.67.222.222"
  do
    echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'`
  done
done

On my firewall and OpenDNS was faster than Google DNS. Won't be switching then.

[kk.]

His blog post is a bit bias..

As for speed, soon enough google will invest more into the devlopment of Europe

[N!ck]

Yep, ran the test script I found:

#!/bin/sh
 
for i in "lifehacker.com" "facebook.com" "manu-j.com"  "reddit.com" "tb4.fr" "bbc.co.uk"
do
  for j in "4.2.2.2" "8.8.8.8" "208.67.222.222"
  do
    echo $j $i `dig @$j $i | grep Query | awk -F ":" '{print $2}'`
  done
done

On my firewall and OpenDNS was faster than Google DNS. Won't be switching then.

I like the script. Running from my server in France I get:

4.2.2.2 lifehacker.com 16 msec
8.8.8.8 lifehacker.com 11 msec
208.67.222.222 lifehacker.com 4 msec
4.2.2.2 facebook.com 27 msec
8.8.8.8 facebook.com 12 msec
208.67.222.222 facebook.com 4 msec
4.2.2.2 manu-j.com 17 msec
8.8.8.8 manu-j.com 12 msec
208.67.222.222 manu-j.com 75 msec
4.2.2.2 reddit.com 111 msec
8.8.8.8 reddit.com 13 msec
208.67.222.222 reddit.com 4 msec
4.2.2.2 tb4.fr 16 msec
8.8.8.8 tb4.fr 11 msec
208.67.222.222 tb4.fr 24 msec
4.2.2.2 bbc.co.uk 16 msec
8.8.8.8 bbc.co.uk 13 msec
208.67.222.222 bbc.co.uk 4 msec

From Chicago:

4.2.2.2 lifehacker.com 1 msec
8.8.8.8 lifehacker.com 13 msec
208.67.222.222 lifehacker.com 0 msec
4.2.2.2 facebook.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 facebook.com 12 msec
208.67.222.222 facebook.com 1 msec
4.2.2.2 manu-j.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 manu-j.com 13 msec
208.67.222.222 manu-j.com 2 msec
4.2.2.2 reddit.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 reddit.com 14 msec
208.67.222.222 reddit.com 1 msec
4.2.2.2 tb4.fr 2 msec
8.8.8.8 tb4.fr 12 msec
208.67.222.222 tb4.fr 1 msec
4.2.2.2 bbc.co.uk 2 msec
8.8.8.8 bbc.co.uk 13 msec
208.67.222.222 bbc.co.uk 2 msec

For non cached entrys maybe Google is quicker?

The OpenDNS ones in Chicago are probably a little unfair though considering OpenDNS have servers practically in the same datacentre .

His blog post is a bit bias..

As for speed, soon enough google will invest more into the devlopment of Europe

Yeah, of course it's biased.

The thing is though that OpenDNS have their servers practically located inside the the two major peering exchanges in Europe (LINX and AMS-IX) where lots if European traffic flows through and every ISP has very good connections into. To get to Google's datacentre(s) you generally have to pass through one of these exchanges where Google peers so it's going to add extra hops and latency.

[Tomm]

Seems to fare better in my German based server (Frankfurt), although does not really compare to home connections as, well, its in a datacenter with high speed, low latency uplinks Although, Level3's DNS server is still faster.

[root@srv1 ~]# ./dns_test.sh
4.2.2.2 lifehacker.com 59 msec
8.8.8.8 lifehacker.com 1 msec
208.67.222.222 lifehacker.com 14 msec
4.2.2.2 facebook.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 facebook.com 1 msec
208.67.222.222 facebook.com 12 msec
4.2.2.2 manu-j.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 manu-j.com 3 msec
208.67.222.222 manu-j.com 13 msec
4.2.2.2 reddit.com 2 msec
8.8.8.8 reddit.com 8 msec
208.67.222.222 reddit.com 13 msec
4.2.2.2 tb4.fr 1 msec
8.8.8.8 tb4.fr 3 msec
208.67.222.222 tb4.fr 14 msec
4.2.2.2 bbc.co.uk 1 msec
8.8.8.8 bbc.co.uk 3 msec
208.67.222.222 bbc.co.uk 29 msec

[N!ck]

Result for what seems to be uncached.

France:

4.2.2.2 randomsite.com 33 msec
8.8.8.8 randomsite.com 253 msec
208.67.222.222 randomsite.com 137 msec

Chicago:

4.2.2.2 randomsite.com 163 msec
8.8.8.8 randomsite.com 172 msec
208.67.222.222 randomsite.com 244 msec

Both OpenDNS and Google's are extremely slow for me compared to my Uni's DNS servers at <1ms for me though .