I have a really fast internet connection. On paper and according to the tests at dslreports.com and speedtest.net. But it just felt slow. Pages would take a while to get going. Images on blogs wouldn’t load very quickly - especially if they linked to from another site. The perceptive performance of my much slower DSL was better. That’s. Just. Wrong.

After some head scratching, testing, experimenting, and dog beatingpetting, I think I figured it out (and the lice shampoo took care of the itchy scalp). All Comcast’s DNS servers are running on a single Mac IIe. Over a 300-baud Applecat modem. So those pauses I’m seeing when surfing the webola are from the DNS server catching on fire, falling over, and sinking into the swamp (Comcast does, literally, have huge tracts of land).

So I changed my DNS servers to the OpenDNS server addresses. I changed these on my computer (an Apple Mac Pro), not on my router, so that my computer has a single path to retrieving the lookups. Previously I had tried OpenDNS but had set the router to use them, and set my computer to use the router’s settings. This does seem to make a difference, which is a bit surprising since my network at home is all Gigabit ethernet. Go figure.

My perception is that everything is snappier and more responsive. I don’t really have any way to measure this, so this is a definite seat of the bermuda shorts measurement. So your milage may vary.

Give it a try and let me know if it improved your surfing.

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Should this connection feel slow? Hell to the no!