Solved Will OpenDNS Really Speed Up My Internet?

[hcour]

I'd never heard of this but read about it on another forum. Will this really speed up my internet?

I have a TWC Road Runner cable modem, a Linksys wireless router which I use wired, and I use a static IP address because I have port-forwarding.

Thanks!

 

[z3r010]

It all depends on how good your ISP's DNS servers are, mine suck so switching to an alternate DNS provider speeds things up slightly.

For me personally I find Google's public DNS to be the fastest and it seems to update quicker - https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/

 

[kronckew]

opendns has other benefits, like blocking known malware sites, ability to block categories of sites like 'adult', 'drugs', 'social networking', 'hate sites', etc. you do need to set up a (free) account for this. it's easy if you have a fixed IP, if you don't you can run a small app that updates your account with opendns if the IP changes. you can also set it to get stats on your pc useage. you can blacklist/whitelist specific sites too.

they also have a small (experimental) app that acts as a localhost proxy to use https to connect to the dns servers, encrypting and anonimizing your dns traffic. it's a tad more difficult to set up.

google is a tad faster (try google's dns benchmark 'namebench') but doesn't have the extra bells and whistles, and i suspect google's use of statistical data.

 

[hcour]

I went ahead and signed up for OpenDNS to get the extra goodies. Definitely seeing a boost in page loads. Very nice.

Thanks guys!

 

[Alejandro85]

I generally doubt about the speed of public DNS services, since they're geographically distant often have higher response times than local ones. But they have the advantage of not suffering ISP censorship and rarely blocks sites.

You can use an open source tool called "Namebench" (namebench - Open-source DNS Benchmark Utility - Google Project Hosting) that does measure the speed of many DNS servers, both local to you and public so you can know for sure what's better. In my case, all local ISPs beat GoogleDNS and OpenDNS.

 

[hcour]

Thanks. I dl'ed it and will check it out.

 

[hcour]

Ok. Well, I ran the namebench program and it said Google would be 86% faster than my current DNS. So I switched from OpenDNS to Google, ran namebench again and it said OpenDNS would be 20% faster than my current DNS!

Should I run it several times to see what is the most consistent?

 

[Alejandro85]

I never ran it twice in a row, just a few times over many months and it was always consistent. In any case, when you run it, stop all your internet activity while it runs (no chat, browsing, downloads, etc) just to get a clean lecture. It might also be influenced by internet traffic on the tested server too, which is outside your control. In those cases, yes, I would choose the one with the most favorable ratings, keeping that as primary and the other as secondary.

 

[hcour]

Ah. I was browsing and dl'ing when I ran it. I'll do it again w/o any other activity. Thanks again.

 

[kronckew]

google may be 86% faster than opendns, but you are now talking relative. BOTH are probably a LOT faster than your old ISP's dns server. you might want to run the namebench test while set for the old isp dns & then compare the relative speeds. ie. if opendns takes 10 ms and google takes 5 ms, and your isp takes 100 ms, then google is 100% faster than opendns, but both are way faster than the isp and the actual difference from both to the isp makes the choice a toss up. you might want to mess with the default benchmark settings on , more iterations (number of queries) and more from the query data source means more accurate. also takes longer.

in any case, i did mention that google may be a bit faster, but opendns has better perks.

also both google and opendns are not necessarily 'remote' or 'distant' as they both maintain clusters of servers in locations around the world, and always seem to be adding more. you are thus always likely to be close to one of the clusters. the cluster controller is always at the same IP address, 208.67.222/222, 208.67.220.220 or 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4 but this is re-directed to a physical server nearest to you. mine is in london.

opendns
Servers are located:[ref]

• Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Dallas, Texas, USA
• Frankfurt, Germany
• London, United Kingdom
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• Miami, Florida, USA
• New York, New York, USA
• Palo Alto, California, USA
• Seattle, Washington, USA
• Singapore
• Washington, DC, USA
• Hong Kong, China

google's are similarly scattered around the world. all are mostly in the northern hemisphere, so y'all down south may be a bit distant from both google and opendns.

 

[hcour]

Thanks for the info. I'll play around w/it a bit and see what kind of results I get. Still w/google right now and, yes, it's noticeably faster than RR.