J Dev 7

Tweaking DNS Setting – A Way to Speed Up Internet Connection

Typically there are many factors that contribute a slow internet connection such as: a bad line from the customer premises to the nearest central office of the service provider, Central office problems, buggy software, and mostly due to the Web farm servers you browse to at the other end of the connection. So how do you speed up internet connection?

Generally when you sign-up the internet connection, there should be such kind of a service level agreement at least we 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 internet 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. Definitely it is beyond our control when the bottom lines of the problems come from the ISP, the central office equipment, and slow web servers. But basically you can tweak the computers to get them in high performance in browsing the internet. The following guidelines will help you manipulate the computers to speed up internet connection.

How to tweak DNS setting to speed up internet connection

When you type in the hostnames in the browser such as Cisco.com, the DNS resolver needs to translate it into the corresponding IP address such as 55.125.102.113. DNS servers provide that name resolution automatically and behind the scenes as you surf the Web.

Editing Host File
A very simple way to speed up internet 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, and then send the IP address back to your PC. You can eliminate that delay by creating or editing a local HOSTS file on your own PC that contains hostnames and their corresponding IP addresses. Windows will first lookup the entry in the HOSTS file to see if there’s an entry for the hostname, and, if it finds it, it will resolve the address itself. That way, you won’t have to go out to a DNS server and wait for the response before visiting a web site. You can edit the HOSTS file with the notepad editor and you can create lists of most frequent web sites you visit.

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Adjust the Computer DNS Caching Settings
You can also adjust the DNS Caching setting to help speed up internet connection. When you visit a site, Windows puts the DNS information into 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 have to query a remote DNS server to find IP information. The cache is made up of recently queried names and entries taken from your HOSTS file.The cache contains both negative and positive entries that we can hack to help speed up internet connection. Positive entries are those in which the DNS lookup succeeded, and you were able to connect to the web site. When XP looks in the cache, if it finds a positive entry, it immediately uses that DNS information and sends you to the requested web site.

Negative entries are those in which no match was found, and you end up getting a “Cannot find server or DNS Error” in your browser. Similarly, when the computer looks in the cache and 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 get an error message, even if the site’s problems have been resolved and it’s now reachable.You can solve this problem to speed up internet connection using a Registry hack. By default, XP caches negative entries for five minutes. After five minutes, they’re cleared from your cache. But if you’d like, you can force XP not to cache these negative entries, so that you’ll never run into this problem.

Edit the registry using registry editor (Regedit from the Run command) and go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters.
Create a new DWORD value with the name NegativeCacheTime and 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’re done editing, exit the Registry.

To make the change 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 and negative, will be flushed, and it will be empty until you start visiting web sites. Negative entries, however, will not be added to the cache if you’ve given the DWORD a value of 0. To help you speed up internet connection you can also reduce the Web Cache as small as possible. The less disk space in your computer Web Cache for internet temporary files is less data the computer needs to search through. How to do that?

From your Windows, do the following:
Click Start => Select Control Panel => double click Internet Options => and then click Settings under Browsing History.

Reduce the Disk Space to Use to the minimum amount the system recommend or as low as you want. Clear Internet Temporary Files

Another good way to speed up internet connection is to clear your internet temporary files. Many files in the web cache are active such as cookies are loaded in the browsers and constantly update themselves when you are surfing the internet. The computers always search the temporary files to match the latest version of a web page. To speed up internet connection you can clear the web cache to cut down the works the computer needs to do.

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