I notice that inspite of good traffic, you are keeping the User Interface simple. Any specific reason?

> How do your tests hold up with this DNS extension implemented?

Uh, you tell us once you get it approved and rolled out to BIND and all the other name servers in use.

-Gary

@Jason : Agree PING is not the optimal test, but it gives a fairly accurate indication of distance. When I have time I will set up a dummy file on both CDNs tested and compare time to download those files. Any objections to that?

@Tom Limoncelli: Didn’t know about that extension. Once/if that is implemented, my blogpost would become irrelevant.

@Remco : Thanks for your test data, ill include it in my tables soon. could you report ping timing to 92.122.217.122 ? it seems to be missing.

@Vincent : I have no knowledge about running Python on Windows. dnspython can be obtained from http://www.dnspython.org/ . I think you need to also replace “ping -c 5 -q ” with “ping -n 5 ” in the script. The arguments for ping in Windows is different than Linux. Unfortunately I have nowhere to test the script with Windows.

@Michael : I’d welcome test data from a Canada

@Olivier Mignault : Thanks for accusing me of skewing the data. Please see the table Internap data for “Softlayer (US-East Coast)” and Akamai data for “EC2 (US-East Coast)” and “EC2 (Europe)” gave better ping times for non local DNS and i have shown it as it is. I ran the script and posted whatever I got. Non Local resolvers gave better results than local only by few milliseconds and the result IPs were in the same range. The better ping times were a mere coincidence. See only the non-datacenter locations (Singapore, Sweden, India and Thailand) to notice the difference. Those are purely home connections.

@Nick : Cool, in fact after I posted I noticed few others noticed similar thing some as far back in 2008. - http://blog.goolamabbas.org/2008/02/24/impact-of-opendns-on-cdn-services-particularly-when-used-in-asia/

@Marco van den Berg : All clients need to be in the same network as the central in-house DNS resolver to get the optimal results…

@Richard : Thanks, you could post the results somewhere and Ill link to it from my tables, or if you don’t want to do that, I can post it on my blog too. Your results would be highly appreciated. you can contact me at sajal at thaindian dot com

@Angsuman Chakraborty: Agreed!

@Chris: The bandwidth is a problem in Asia (esp Thailand) with intercontinental links running at its saturation point. I understand that you block advertising (viewing free stuff while wasting the websites bandwidth and resources and not allowing them to monetize), but do you also block css, javascripts, flash, videos and images? These are also usually CDN’d. Without loading the stylesheet usually the page doesn’t start rendering.

While the issue identified is valid and has implications for bandwidth, I don’t think that bandwidth is the bottleneck. It is more likely to be your browser. You say “Most websites embed widgets, advertising and other assets which are likely to be CDN’d.” I block advertising, so it doesn’t matter. I tend to ignore widgets. In any case, the substance of the page loads first so that I can begin reading even if the CDN-stuff hasn’t loaded yet. I can even stop them loading if I don’t want to see your widgets.