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d4m1r
join:2011-08-25

d4m1r

Member

Re: [Cable] For those that use OpenDNS or Google DNS...

I never experience slow downloads (slower during weekday nights but nothing major) but once doing some technical research into OpenDNS (which is what I use because of Googles privacy policies) I found out about these Akamai servers. For Ontario cable customers, they are Rogers and not TSI's as far as I know.

I always download from HTTP direct links and they are not usually popular files so I personally won't notice a difference but I've seen several people post that their downloads are slow but overall web traffic is fine which I found weird..
BikeHelmet
join:2010-04-15

BikeHelmet

Member

Click for full size
priyen asked me to post more info.

These are the pages to be edited. They'll look slightly different because I'm using Toastman's Tomato rather than TomatoUSB or stock Tomato.

More info on the options I chose here:
»www.thekelleys.org.uk/dn ··· man.html

log-async is a performance option. It needs to be somewhere between 5-25 (apparently) or large numbers of DNS requests can stall while it waits to log them.

no-negcache prevents your router from remembering that there's no domain. It checks every single time. Every once and a while overclock.net would timeout for me - some weird DNS/website glitch. After it happened I'd have to reboot my router to clear the DNS table. (until I discovered this tweak)

It happened with both Telus and Teksavvy, so it's some weird issue with where their servers were located and how they were setup. Any which way, now they're with a different host, so it's not strictly necessary.

dhcp-authoritative says that this router is the only DHCP router on the network, and must be obeyed. It apparently speeds up DHCP negotiation slightly.

Reduce packet size shrinks DNS packets to prevent ornery routers between you and the DNS servers from dropping them. Near as I can tell that one should be enabled for everyone, so I'm not sure why it's optional/visible. Unticking it caused DNS timeouts for me. (Long 20-30 second delays before webpages started to load)
priyen
join:2009-12-23
North York, ON

priyen

Member

Thanks, helped a lot. Is there anyway i can "test" if there is a performance increase or anything?
BikeHelmet
join:2010-04-15

BikeHelmet

Member

said by priyen:

Thanks, helped a lot. Is there anyway i can "test" if there is a performance increase or anything?

Not really. All of our connections are subject to congestion and other line issues, so if there is a difference, there's no way to know if it's because of the DNS changes or just how good your internet is on that given day.

It mostly comes down to what you notice - and I notice a lot less 20 second delays while it resolves hosts. But to graph that I'd have to run some sort of benchmarking software 24/7 for several weeks.