1) Your ISP DNS servers are normally the closest servers to your PC.
2) DNS lookups take, on average 20-40ms. A slow resolver might take 100ms. If you reduced that to zero, for 5 DNS lookups per web-page, you’re still not saving anything compared to the site download and rendering time of typically 25 seconds on a smartphone or pocketPC.
3) You don’t have any form of contract with a ‘free’ third party DNS server so you won’t have any come-back if they do something wrong or if someone abuses the service.
My best tip for speeding up your mobile internet activities (on smartphones) is to use Opera Mini. While the same security issues exists, they actually do some very impressive stuff with compressing the content resulting much more of a speed-up that changing DNS servers will. For UMPC’s, look into something like Skweezer which can save time and bandwidth.
OpenDNS looks like a good solution for auto-blocking unwanted websites but not as a browsing speed-up tool.
Trick of the Day: Speed up your web browsing in Internet Explorer Mobile! – WMExperts
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Steve, have you tried OpenDNS for yourself yet?
Yes, your ISP should be closer. But ISP’s DNS usually requires traversal of the Internet, upping the overall round-trip. OpenDNS runs huge caches so those round-trips are nearly eliminated. Additionally, OpenDNS is located at major carrier intersections, with three bandwidth provider, expressly to speed up the entire cycle. Using OpenDNS doesn’t speed your HTTP download, but it definitely can improve your overall speed.
People choose OpenDNS: more than 3 million people daily, so far, making more than 4 billion DNS requests daily. There’s no contract, but do you have a contract with Blogger or Yahoo Mail or Gmail? No… they have to earn you use through a better service, just like we do. We’ve never been down, and we document system status at http://system.opendns.com/
I agree that Opera Mini is a great browser — but you don’t have to limit yourself to a single speed up step. Does anyone want anything to be slower?
Cheers,
John Roberts
OpenDNS
John.
Open DNS is not a mobile browser speed-up service. No-one on a mobile phone is going to see any major difference. Testing out your servers from my Linux machine here shows that your servers take over twice as long to respond than my local server for a common hostname. For a random, guessed (uncached) hostname, your servers took over 200ms more to respond. Your service would actually slow me down.
I see advantages in OpenDNS but, even if your servers were fast, you wouldn’t gain more than a 100ms per page and promoting a few hundred ms advantage is hardly a serious speed-up on mobile browsing where most of the avergage 25 seconds per page is spent rendering.
OPenDNS is a service that promises to manage DNS results, not speed them up. In some scenarios thats great and exactly what the user wants, I will seriously consider switching my daughters DNS over to it, but its not a real browsing speed-up service.
Steve
The assumption here, that I would suggest is erroneous for some users, is that their current ISP’s DNS servers are both locationally optimal and the servers themselves are efficient enough to resolve the IP address in a timely manner.
Those are both assumptions though and not necessarily true. I would argue that mobile phone carrier’s DNS servers are not optimal and they do not put much emphasis on the speed on the server end. The reasons should be obvious: mobile carriers are not so much ISPs currently, but phone service providers–the latter is primary, the former secondary in empahsis. That is changing slowly but still releveant for our discussion.
Regarding location, it depends on where you are connecting too but one argument could be made that OpenDNS handles server locations more efficiently and/or have more locations for servers, thereby increasing efficiency.
Fact is, I can attest that Sprint’s servers do get hammered from time to time and DNS lookups can get significantly delayed. This observation that OpenDNS is more optimal for mobile devices has been attested to by many users for at least 2 years now i.e. it is not something new.
Point being is I see no down-sides to switching to OpenDNS–it certainly is not any slower and from my extensive experience I do notice an increase in resolving IP.
To suggest otherwise is to basically take the position that
(1) All DNS servers (hardware) are the same
(2) They are all equal geographically in relation
I would say both of those are false–not all DNS servers are the same and some are better than others.
OperaMini bypasses this simply by using proxy servers to do all the legwork of processing data and then compresses it, like aGPS. While interesting, there are security issues to at least be aware of as well as inherent limitations on mobile devices e.g. there is no native Windows Mobile or PalmOS version, you have to run them through a 3rd party Java application–you thereby increase system instability and loose the ability for downloads.
–malatesta
I think we are getting off my original point that OpenDNS is not likely to be an option for speeding up browsing. There are some advantages to using OpenDNS i’m not knocking the service, but they are not speed-up advantage but users folowing the published speed-up advise should be aware of exactly how much of a speed improvement is possible with this service. Its minimal, if anything in most cases.
Thanks for joining the conversation. Its nice to see somebody is reading and as I said, i’m looking to configure my daughters PC with OpenDNS pretty soon.
Steve.
So.. use it or not?
Steve,
I think whether you’ll see a speedup or not depends entirely on how well-configured your ISP’s servers are. For instance, I’ve been using 3’s pay-as-you-go mobile broadband (in the UK), and I’ve been getting DNS responses in the range of 200-500ms. Switching to OpenDNS has saved me a lot of time on that.
DNS lookups can take a lot longer than 100ms, as Jules pointed out. Most Irish ISPs have poor DNS servers (particularly three and eircom), and I’ve swapped over DNS servers with a subsequent fall in loading times for various people.
I don’t use OpenDNS anymore as I don’t like how they make money. The whole redirecting google requests issue, along with possibly targeted ads is not good. I generally use Level3’s 4.2.2.2 address. Equally reliable, multiple local DNS servers around the world and the lack of redirections gets my thumbs-up.
Virgin has very poor DNS servers that not only take up to several seconds to resolve a name, but sometimes fail to resolve a name at all, which means you have to keep retrying. Even worse, their DNS servers were down for several hours yesterday and the only way to use the web was with alternative DNS servers. This has happened several times before. I’ll forego the faster ping time of Virgin’s servers for the reliability and speed of OpenDNS servers.
A comparison of popular DNS servers and how to use them. Check it out here http://everythingoutthere.izfree.com/?p=100
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