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I'm in Europe, while my nameservers are located in the US. If I change my second nameserver to be in Europe, would it significantly improve DNS lookup times?

BnMcG
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  • It depend on where are your servers, and who visit your sites – Froggiz Nov 22 '15 at 14:16
  • @Froggiz the servers themselves are also located in the US, but it seems like DNS lookup is taking a significant amount of time during page loads. – BnMcG Nov 22 '15 at 14:19

2 Answers2

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No. Yes. No.

No because as I understand it nameserver lookups are often round robin. This means that half of your lookups would be faster. I doubt that this is your intention.

Yes because have a geographically closer nameserver can improve speed. (Stressing the can here since it obviously depends on a lot of factors. It can be faster, it is not always faster).

And finally a no again. DNS lookups are usually cached.So only the first attempt to resolv them matters. Afterward queries should come out of your resolver cache.


Lastly: Which problem are you trying to solve? Your own DNS lookups? Speed for your sites for people globally? Your two line post really does not give enough information.

Hennes
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  • Thanks for the response! I'm partially interested as to whether I could speed up load times marginally on some of my sites, but it was mostly just a general question out of curiosity, hence why it was so vague. – BnMcG Nov 22 '15 at 14:30
  • Assuming your sites get big enough you might want to look at CDNs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network). – Hennes Nov 22 '15 at 14:33
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There are multiple issues you can solve by distributing DNS servers geographically:

  • Redundancy/Availability
  • Speed

Redundancy will allow you to make sure your data is available in the case of outages of your server or datacenter. More DNS servers will increase your redundancy. Spreading them geographically (and more important, over different networks/AS'es) will increase availability in case of network outages.

For extra speed you could resolve to anycasting (a great read!). This technique will make a host with a single IP address available at multiple locations on the internet and mitigate the round-robin characteristics of DNS. But probably you would like to give this task to a service partner who can handle this for you.

Community
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Joffrey
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  • Anycast. That was the term my mind was blanking on. – Hennes Nov 22 '15 at 14:56
  • @Hennes: CDN's tend to use anycasting as well, but you can't call a bunch of DNS servers a content delivery network ;) – Joffrey Nov 22 '15 at 14:58
  • I know. I just drew a complete blank on the anycast term and eventually added only the CDN in the comment as useful reading material. – Hennes Nov 22 '15 at 15:02