It’s always DNS

Last week I had a call from a client who was reporting slow internet speeds. In particular, their yahoo email start page was really dragging. I arranged for a remote session to see if I could find the cause easily. I also instructed the client to reboot their modem, router and switch. Nothing obvious came up in my troubleshooting session so I arranged for an on-site visit.

After performing some routine maintenance, I stopped and just looked at the problem with a “beginner’s mind”. As I watched the page load ever so slowly, I noticed in teeny tiny writing at the bottom of the Safari window “resolving host….” As the light bulb went off in my head, I said to myself it’s DNS!

I called their ISP to see if there were any particular issues with the standard DNS servers.  Of course their answer was no and that their servers were working just fine. So after using this very cool utility from Google http://code.google.com/p/namebench/ I replaced  AT&T’s DNS server entries with Open DNS which was reportedly 300% faster.

Wow, what a difference. It’s pretty rare that I change the DNS servers from the ISP, but I’ll be doing it more often after this experience.