I have seemingly fast ping times on my wireless network, but sometimes when I try to access fast websites, resolving host is very slow

Question

Here's an output for a mtr to google.com

                                                       Packets               Pings
 Host                                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. ???
 2. Wireless_Broadband_Router.home                    0.0%    59    2.0  11.3   1.8 105.3  18.9
 3. lo0-100.NWRKNJ-VFTTP-332.verizon-gni.net          0.0%    59    7.3  11.1   3.8  33.7   6.6
 4. T1-15-0-13.NWRKNJ-LCR-22.verizon-gni.net          0.0%    59   41.0  14.4   6.8  41.0   7.4
 5. ???
 6. ???
 7. 0.ae6.GW2.EWR19.ALTER.NET                         0.0%    58   14.3  18.1   6.2  52.0  10.9
 8. GOOGLE-gw.customer.alter.net                      0.0%    58    8.8  15.0   6.7  61.7  10.0
 9. 54.14.117.63.piscataway.google-ggc.verizon.com    0.0%    58   12.1  15.4   6.5  46.2   7.7

As far as I can tell, it doesn't seem so bad. However, about 50% of the time I'm trying to access a website (e.g. google, Facebook, other reliable / fast sites), it will take several seconds before resolving the host

For example, this request to google.com:

Queueing 15.38 ms
Stalled 8.26 s
DNS Lookup 8.26 s
Initial connection 29.39 ms
SSL 21.18 ms

Request sent 0.21 ms
Waiting (TTFB) 120.38 ms
Content Download 671.17 ms

9.10 s

Can anyone explain why this happens, or even better, provide me with a solution?

Answer 1

What is most likely happening is that you have multiple DNS servers configured (either directly through DHCP, or the DNS server you are pointing to has them), and the first DNS server is timing out - which takes a while - the request is then sent to the second server which responds and the page loads.

As stated by @Keltari, the solution is to fix the problem with the DNS servers. If you don't mind Google tracking you, setting the primary server to 8.8.8.8 will make things faster, but ideally you should track down the server which is not responding and remove it from the configuration.

Answer 2

This is not what's happening. My phone is using straight Verizon Wireless DNS servers, and has weird, Verizon-owned proxies for some major sites, likely without payment agreements to get preferred access to Verizon customers or for other reasons that probably aren't too nefarious. Mini article I wrote about it

For example, Verizon modified their DNS to point www.google.com to their own proxies, such as 89.14.117.63.piscataway.google-ggc.verizon.com (63.117.14.89) for Version users connecting to Google the west coast US.

Also, remember that some actual websites use many different servers all over the world to speed up access using Anycast/GeoDNS... your friend in one place could be hitting a completely different datacenter(s) that you (plus, Google, with OpenFlow, "steers" its traffic to many different datacenters under the hood).

(I'm an SRE Google tried to hire a number of times.)

See also: https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6870/can-a-google-server-only-be-accessible-to-verizon-customers-and-those-in-the-sou