Speed up DNS resolution

[Markus]

Patrick, you have chosen a TTL of 1 day:
http://www.nabber.org/projects/dnscheck/...getest.org

So that is the time that is best from your point of view for a website like yours?
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/webpagetest.org

[pmeenan]

I had it at 3 hours and bumped it up to one day because of a surge in traffic with the Google Page Speed Service launch and I wanted to keep my DNS queries well under my limit for my DNS Made Easy account :-)

The server is on a static IP and I can easily move that IP to another physical box if there are any production problems. If my hosting site goes down it will take me a while to bring it up somewhere else so 1 day is reasonable for my specific needs.

[Markus]

Thank you for the explaination, Patrick.

[Eyewebmaster]

This is an interesting DNS help for me. I've will try to apply this to some of my domain names.

[jasom]

(10-19-2011 06:54 AM)pmeenan Wrote:  Your best bets are to:
- Use a DNS service that uses Anycast for their servers
- Make sure the DNS provider has servers distributed globally (and that perform well)
- Try to avoid long CNAME chains (try to avoid them at all if possible)
- Use a long Time To Live (TTL) on your records so they can be cached by the ISPs and users

From mentioned about I think that most effective is focus on 2nd option. My server is in Praque, my domain registrar (eNOM) is in US. I was not able to find if they use some kind of distributed DNS (SE Asia region has too long DNS look up).

I found out that Cloudflare has free globally distributed DNS network.

[pmeenan]

I'd recommend first installing a RUM monitoring solution like Soasta's mPulse that will report the DNS times that your users are seeing. Then if you experiment with a change you can see what the actual impact was (if any). If you do experiment, make sure to give it several days for the various DNS caches to update (the authoratative DNS provider switch sometimes takes a few days to propagate).