Live data from Hacker News

DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

medium.com

51–60 of 364 posts

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#51

I feel like people forgot about how CloudFlare, Google, et. al. can new effectively censor content they don't agree with: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... ..and even though CloudFlare back pedaled on that particular decision somewhat, it still happened. If you really want something fast and secure, run your own caching DNS that uses root DNS servers.

This is some pretty sage advice. I think it's great that Cloudflare is offering the service, but it's relatively simple (and fun!) to setup up our own. There's guide in the link below for using unbound server to do this. Example#1 fits many people. And, if we choose to censor any domains we can always do so on our own service... take a look at Example#2!

https://calomel.org/unbound_dns.html

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#52
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what original test was testing.

What? It says >Our test was very simple and we performed 70 DNS lookups That's not ICMP.

Well, the article says so, but they actually measured icmp response. All major domains are in DNS cache anyway. If you look at Yandex result you see it performed very poorly. Why does it resolve popular domains so slow? The reason is it has one server and it is located in Moscow.

So i would say icmp is good proxy to actual performance.

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#53
post #50

I feel like people forgot about how CloudFlare, Google, et. al. can new effectively censor content they don't agree with: https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-... ..and even though CloudFlare back pedaled on that particular decision somewhat, it still happened. If you really want something fast and secure, run your own caching DNS that uses root DNS servers.

> If you really want something fast and secure, run your own caching DNS that uses root DNS servers. is there a good tutorial for this somewhere?

If you want to do it on your local linux system, it's pretty easy: you just need to install bind9 and use `nameserver 127.0.0.1` in your /etc/resolv.conf

Bind9 has a poor reputation because of how difficult it is to use it to define zones (manage a domain name), but if you want to use it as a resolver, it's basically plug'n'play.

Huge bonus included : if you want to flush the cache, you just need to run `sudo rndc flush`, so you don't have to wait for TTL timeout to test your newly configured domain name when you setup a website (you still have to restart your browser, because most of them do their own dns caching).

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#54
post #42
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9.9.9.9 does not pass along EDNS client subnet resulting in wrong geo-located responses. It is their "feature".

According to the FAQ[1], they also offer 9.9.9.10, which passes client subnet at the cost of other features. [1] https://www.quad9.net/faq

Fair enough, but most users won't care enough look it up and use 9.9.9.10 instead of 9.9.9.9 if they want better performance in exchange for allegedly lower privacy.

It appears 1.1.1.1 also does not pass client-subnet, atleast not by default. Queries to my authoritative from Google always includes client subnet, OpenDNS required request for whitelist. For Cloudflare its unclear.

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you really want something fast and secure, run your own caching DNS that uses root DNS servers. is there a good tutorial for this somewhere?

If you want to do it on your local linux system, it's pretty easy: you just need to install bind9 and use `nameserver 127.0.0.1` in your /etc/resolv.conf Bind9 has a poor reputation because of how difficult it is to use it to define zones (manage a domain name), but if you want to use it as a resolver, it's basically plug'n'play. Huge bonus included : if you want to flush the cache, you just need to run `sudo rndc fl…

Honestly, isn’t Unbound a better shout if you’re not going to be fiddling with it? Just install, run, and edit /etc/resolv.conf to point at 127.0.0.1.

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#56
Which ISPs are so bad that you want to use external services, which are further in distance than your ISP, for speed? When I test with my ISP, they beat all of these services (both IPv4 and IPv6). They're simply closer to me in terms of hops.

My router is another story though. The Fritzbox (>200eur router) adds 6ms of latency, and that's what is advertised over DHCP. (Might still be fine, since cached queries are faster than the ping time to the ISP.) Note that my tests were all with uncached queries (random subdomains of a domain), so it always had to go out and ask an external server (though it could cache the NS record for the domain).

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#57
post #27

Besides response time, the next level of comparison is how well geo-DNS-based services (global load balancing, etc.) support these resolvers. AFAIK 8.8.8.8 gives decent results in most places, though I've seen suboptimal US-centric results from Quad9 in Asia. Support for RFC 7871 (Client Subnet in DNS Queries) comes into play here too.

I always used 8.8.8.8, since I couldn't remember OpenDNS's IPs. But just found out today that, from Sydney, OpenDNS and Cloudflare are kicking Google's ass for speed. 8.8.8.8 is on par with my ISP-default DNS.

Ever since The Great Comcast DNS Outage of 2010, I've had the OpenDNS IPs burned into my memory from telling so many people.

I like the fact that you can sign up for OpenDNS and customize some of the filtering (ads, spam/malware, etc.) They used to have crappy handling of nxdomains (by default) redirecting you to a website with ads, but I believe that's no longer the case?

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#58
post #29
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But your DNS will have to query other DNS providers so if you’re the only one using it, it won’t be private.

There is 2 main different ways, one which does what you say - the other i'd say is pretty much OK. If your local DNS server is merely querying an upstream resolver (like 1.1.1.1 / 8.8.8.8) on your behalf, then yes - it is no different. If however, you query the root nameservers for the glue record for a domain and query the domain's own nameservers directly, then it is pretty good... As you are neither querying your…

> (The caveat is that some ISP's do transparent DNS proxying.. in which case, you have much larger trust issues with your ISP and need to take greater measures!)

I once had an ISP which did transparent http proxying. You could theoretically query an external DNS server and get back the correct result, but it would intercept your http connection, discard the ip address you were trying to connect to then do a new DNS lookup to the ISP's DNS server on the HOST header.

Took me ages to work out what was going on with the various issues it was causing.

I dumped that ISP like a rock after they refused to disable that caching proxy, which they claimed was only there to improve customer experience.

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#59
post #56

Which ISPs are so bad that you want to use external services, which are further in distance than your ISP, for speed? When I test with my ISP, they beat all of these services (both IPv4 and IPv6). They're simply closer to me in terms of hops. My router is another story though. The Fritzbox (>200eur router) adds 6ms of latency, and that's what is advertised over DHCP. (Might still be fine, since cached queries are fas…

I've had several ISPs in different countries that do horrible things. Not using NXDomain is one, but I've had some that return NXdomain when they shouldn't, then cache that result!

8.8.8.8 is consistent and easy to remember, and now so is 1.1.1.1

Re: DNS Performance compared: CloudFlare 1.1.1.1 x Google 8.8.8.8 x Quad9 x OpenDNS

#60
post #56

Which ISPs are so bad that you want to use external services, which are further in distance than your ISP, for speed? When I test with my ISP, they beat all of these services (both IPv4 and IPv6). They're simply closer to me in terms of hops. My router is another story though. The Fritzbox (>200eur router) adds 6ms of latency, and that's what is advertised over DHCP. (Might still be fine, since cached queries are fas…

My isp got the brilliant idea of rolling their own YouTube cache servers. It's great in theory but in or active they're under powered and so at peak hours I can't even stream 240p on my 500mbits connection. I've had to block their cache servers in my firewall for YouTube to be butter smooth at 1080p consistently.

Another example is bell Canada who used to mine your DNS queries to profile you for ads, or ISPs that high jack the nxdomain result to send you sponsored results of vaguely similar sounding websites.

Post reply on HN