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Khom Nazid
Asked: 2019-07-15 04:34:03 +0800 CST

DNS Speed tests - are they reliable or sensible?

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We're with Digital Ocean (DO), but I suppose this question applies to anyone hosting anywhere. In the Dnsperf rankings, DO is quite high, but in UltraDNS DNS speed tests, my domains hosted with DO come up much slower than others hosted with GoDaddy. The difference is to the tune of 90ms on DO compared to 2ms on GoDaddy.

Question: do these tests tell me anything about DNS speed, or are they always relative to wherever the test server (from UltraDNS in this case) may be? We're trying to speed up our DNS and have tried the likes of DNSMasq on our 'droplet' VPS server, but the DNS speed tests results remain the same.

Are we over-engineering? Would love to hear any guidance on how to make our DNS work at the best possible speed. Thanks.

domain-name-system

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You are over thinking things.

    DNS is intended to be a distributed service that works off of cached information.

    Don't change DNS records often, and use longer-lived TTLs to allow ISPs and other networks to properly cache your DNS info after an initial request for a host name is made. This way, almost all requests should be handled by a almost-local-to-the-client server, not your actual DNS servers.

    If DNS is slow on your LAN, set up a caching-only DNS server (trivial) and reference that with your internal clients.

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  2. Regarding those tests/benchmarks specifically, the resulting response times will largely be a measure of network latency between their benchmark host(s) and your authoritative nameserver(s).

    This may not be particularly relevant, for several reasons:

    • The response time from your authoritative server essentially matters for the cold cache scenario. This should hopefully be an edge case, not the norm (unless low traffic and/or very short TTL).

    • They measure from some arbitrary selected network(s), not the networks hosting the recursing nameservers that your actual clients use. It may still give some guidance, of course, but results can vary wildly depending on who peers with whom, etc.

    You're probably over-engineering; taking caching into account, this is likely a minimal issue.

    However, to optimize the latency to any given client, you can look into anycast DNS services with nodes in many well-connected networks. That should also be a good pick in terms of reliability (especially if you can combine multiple independent service providers), which is probably more important all things considered.

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