Tweaking DNS Setting – A Way to Speed Up Internet Connection

Generally when you sign-up the web connection, there ought to be such kind of a service level agreement at least they know the bandwidth rate they provide the services to the subscriber. If you use traditional dial-up connection the maximum bandwidth will be 56Kbps. You cannot speed up web connection exceeding the architecture limitation. DOCSIS 3.0 Cable architecture probably can provide you faster speed up to 300 Mbps – but depends on the infrastructure the ISPs have built.

Typically there’s plenty of factors that contribute a slow web connection such as: a bad line from the customer premises to the nearest central office of the service provider, Central office problems, buggy application, & mostly due to the Web farm servers you browse to at the other finish of the connection. So how do you speed up web connection?

Definitely it is beyond our control when the bottom lines of the problems come from the ISP, the central office equipment, & slow web servers. But fundamentally you can tweak the computers to get them in high performance in browsing the web. The following guidelines will help you manipulate the computers to speed up web connection.

How to tweak DNS setting to speed up web connection

When you type in the hostnames in the browser such as Cisco.com, the DNS resolver needs to translate it in to the corresponding IP address such as 55.125.102.113. DNS servers provide that name resolution automatically & behind the scenes as you surf the Web. Editing Host File A very simple way to speed up web connection regarding the DNS setting is by editing the computer local hosts file. It takes time to send your request to a DNS server, have the server look up the proper IP address to resolve the name, & then send the IP address back to your PC. You can eliminate that delay by generating or editing a local HOSTS file on your own PC that contains hostnames & their corresponding IP addresses. Windows will first lookup the entry in the HOSTS file to see if there is an entry for the hostname, &, if it finds it, it will resolve the address itself. That way, you won’t must go out to a DNS server & wait for the response before visiting a website. You can edit the HOSTS file with the notepad editor & you can generate lists of most frequent websites you visit.

You’ll find an existing HOSTS file in C:\System32\Drivers\Etc\HOSTS. Open it in Notepad & enter the IP addresses & hostnames of your commonly visited websites with the following format:

65.301.110.37 sysneta.com #example of the entry 67.101.200.107 computer-network.net

Each entry in the file should be on one line. The IP address should be in the first column & the corresponding hostname in the next column. At least one space should separate the one columns. You can add comments to the file by preceding the line with a hash (#),

Adjust the Computer DNS Caching Settings You can also adjust the DNS Caching setting to help speed up web connection. When you visit a site, Windows puts the DNS information in to a local DNS cache on the computers. When you browse a website, your Computer first looks in its local DNS cache, called the resolve cache, to see whether the DNS information is already in there. If it finds the information locally, it doesn’t must query a remote DNS server to find IP information. The cache is made up of recently queried names & entries taken from your HOSTS file.The cache contains both negative & positive entries that they can hack to help speed up web connection. Positive entries are those in which the DNS lookup succeeded, & you could connect to the world wide website. When XP looks in the cache, if it finds a positive entry, it immediately uses that DNS information & sends you to the requested website.

Negative entries are those in which no match was found, & you finish up getting a “Cannot find server or DNS Error” in your browser. Similarly, when the computer looks in the cache & finds a negative entry, it gives you the error message without bothering to go out to the site.

Negative entries can lead to problems. When you try to make a connection to a site that has a negative entry in your cache, you’ll receive a mistake message, even if the site’s problems have been resolved & it is now reachable.You can solve this problem to speed up web connection using a Registry hack. By default, XP caches negative entries for one minutes. After one minutes, they are cleared from your cache. But if you’d like, you can force XP not to cache these negative entries, so that you’ll seldom run in to this problem.

Edit the registry using registry editor (Regedit from the Run command) & go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters. Generate a new DWORD value with the name NegativeCacheTime & give it a value of 0. (The value may already exist. If it does, edit its value to 0.) The DWORD determines how much time, in seconds, to keep negative entries in the DNS cache. If you like, you can have the entries stay alive for one second by giving it a value of 1. After you are done editing, exit the Registry.

From your Windows, do the following: Click Start => Select Control Panel => click once Web Options => & then click Settings under Browsing History.

To make the modify take effect, restart your computer, or flush your cache by issuing the command ipconfig /flushdns at a command prompt.That command will flush your DNS cache – all the entries, both positive & negative, will be flushed, & it will be empty until you start visiting websites. Negative entries, however, won’t be added to the cache if you have given the DWORD a value of 0. To help you speed up web connection you can also reduce the Web Cache as small as possible. The less disk space in your computer Web Cache for web temporary files is less information the computer needs to search through. How to do that?

Another nice way to speed up web connection is to clear your web temporary files. Plenty of files in the world wide web cache are active such as cookies are loaded in the browsers & constantly update themselves when you are surfing the web. The computers always search the temporary files to match the latest version of a web page. To speed up web connection you can clear the world wide web cache to cut down the works the computer needs to do. The following steps can be tried to delete the world wide web cache, make sure to shutdown the browsers prior performing the steps.

Reduce the Disk Space to Use to the maximum amount the process recommend or as low as you need. Clear Web Temporary Files

the General tab. => check the Delete all offline content box & then click OK.

Click Start => Click Control Panel => click once Web Options => Click Delete Files under Temporary Web Files on

Spyware & viruses Spyware & any types of Web threats can cause the computers to slow down the web response. Some Trojan viruses can also causes slow web connection; scan the virus regularly to help you speed up web connection. Make sure the computers are well protected by the antivirus application.

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One Response to “Tweaking DNS Setting – A Way to Speed Up Internet Connection”

  1. Luke says:

    Finally an excellent post in relation to the subject, keep up the great work and I wish to learn more from you in the long run.

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