RE: (ot) dns

["Kevin Hawkins" <lists@xxxxxxx>]

The content of web pages always takes a little time to load - even if they
are on the same PC as the browser - and some more complex ones can take
longer so the question really is one of are you experiencing extra delays
than would be anticipated. Hard thing to quantify this but a good test is
to
use a premium web site that is quite local to your network provider. For
example with NTL you could try www.bbc.co.uk <http://www.bbc.co.uk/> .

Another thing that effects speed is the 'route' to the destination as all
the points along that route can introduce delays, the delay can vary based
on the time of day and many other network loading factors. If the BBC site
loads fast then it is unlikely that you can much to improve any slow sites
you might be viewing. What sort of time does it take to load a page The BBC
one takes about 1 second here on 512K cable

However there could be a problem - and DNS resolution can cause
this sort of issue. Which ISP are you using and have you entered the
recommended DNS server in the network properties on your dad's PC ? - or
maybe it's automatically set up for you by some installer or by DHCP.
Usually though DNS works or fails. You can bypass DNS by effectively typing
the ip address http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
<http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/> 
directly
into the browser and see if that loads faster - however once a page has
been
viewed it is likely to remain cached somewhere either locally on your PC or
by the ISP so the second time you view it will always be faster.

Running a local DNS server is not really a practical route. Much
better to sort the DNS (or other) issue. At best it might only knock a
fraction of  a second off a page access and I suspect you're seeing much
longer delays than this. What speed is your connection ?



Kevin



-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen [mailto:mail@xxxxxxx]
Sent: 01 March 2003 15:27
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_d] (ot) dns



Hello,

My (lucky) dad has cable, but I found viewing pages still takes a
while to load. Is this because of dns look-up? Is there a way to speed
this up? A local dns server perhaps?

Thanks.