Broadband speed and DNS

[#1]

Anybody have any views on which DNS server is best ?

Currently in a holiday cottage with FTTP from BT at 130/31mb - Hub 2 although the download speed does vary a bit.

My perception is that my Plusnet FTTP 80/20 connection at home is faster in terms of loading pages (same laptop).

Just had a look at home (remotely) and my DNS are Primary 212.159.13.49 and  secondary 212.159.6.9 which are or should be Plusnet defaults from an auto connection set up. Currently using a TP-Link Archer Vr900.

Just wondering if a change is in order ?

[#2]

It probably won't make much difference and there are loads to choose from.

Google is 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

[#3]

According to Gibson's DNS Benchmark there really isn't much difference in response time between the popular  servers.

[#4]

Moderator's note:
Thread moved from Email to Tech Help

[#5]

Thing is that DNS servers are all so fast that you're talking milliseconds for a reply - nothing you can notice. If a reply comes back in under 20ms then that's 20 thousandths of a second. You'll never notice it at all.

While there are a few that take that long, not many do. My own custom DNS server clocks in at 9ms matching many of the big DNS servers out there (and even then it's acting as a non-authoritive server performing it's own lookups to send replies back to the requesting client.

For reliability just use googles 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4

[#6]

@7up I take your point but perception is important and my perception was that when I was away from home using a BT FTTP 130Mbs (DNS unknown) connection pages were a little sluggish loading compared with my 80/20 FTTP Plusnet default at home ?

Back home again I decided to experiment. Curiously using Quad9 instead of the Plusnet default I consistently get 75Mbs using Speedtest.net as opposed to 68-70 with the Plusnet default and once again the perception is that pages load that little bit faster.

I suppose the question is why would that be if they are all much the same? I understand that Quad9 blocks a lot of malware and phishing sites and keep no logs of your IP address so given that I think I’ll stick with them for now.

[#7]

Some connections despite their advertised speed can be a bit slow - especially if it's shared etc.

Your own PC could still have varying results based on how busy the CPU is, how busy the test server is (it affects the speed it can output the file to your browser), how busy the hard drives are, how many  other programs are running etc..

My main PC has one cpu core and 4GB of ram. It connects to the router via wifi and is not always getting good download speeds. It's wifi connection is shared via a network switch to my larger PC which has 8 cores and 16GB of ram. Even though the network traffic goes through the smaller PC, it can often get faster download speeds than the main PC which is less powerful but still handling the same traffic. It's not always the case though, if the server I'm using to test the speed is slow or if the PN network is busy then this can vary dramatically.

But I stand by my point though, DNS servers are designed to work in milliseconds - so fast that you couldn't see it in the blink of an eye.

[#8]

I believe that changing to a faster DNS server did have a very small but noticeable impact on my web browser page loading (when I changed from EE DNS to Cloudflare).... I guess it depends on what the web page content is and how many DNS lookups are required to display it fully.

I chose to go with DoH to improve security so I guess I may be missing some speed benefits because of the HTTPS overheads..(?) but it still seems a bit faster.

[#9]

In your case it's more likely that it's the differing webservers that are affecting your page load times. EG if you use yahoo mail their pages are full of scripts and adverts which are downloaded from many other servers - not just yahoos.

Those other servers may well be sluggish or super fast at differing times of day.

As I said earlier, DNS servers reply within milliseconds. While you may think that you have noticed a difference, it's unlikely caused bhy the dns server you're using but the web servers or network congestion (or lack of).