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I live in the UK and I am a heavy gamer and I get lag spikes that take my ping to 200ms. Will using a third-party DNS Service, for example the one provided by Google, rather than those provided by my internet service provide help with this problem? Download speeds are irrelevant to me.

Ramhound
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Adam Smith
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/24346/discussion-on-question-by-adam-smith-i-sometimes-get-lag-spikes-causing-ping-tim). – Sathyajith Bhat Jun 01 '15 at 12:58

1 Answers1

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The location of DNS servers is irrelevant to network speed.

The DNS server informs your system about the IP address of the site you're looking for.

After that, the DNS is out of the way, the name - IP address correspondence is cached for a period of time and you are connected directly to the IP.

If your ping is taking more than 200 ms, the problem lies on your LAN, the connection to the ISP or the connections from the ISP to the rest of the world.

You can run some tests from your PC to identify where is the bottleneck:

  1. From your PC, ping your router under normal conditions and again under lag spikes. If response times increase, then the problem is in your LAN, and that makes your PC a suspect also.

  2. However, if you get the same times on step 1, then ping a well known site (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) on normal conditions and on lag spikes. If response time increases, the ISP is the problem. Your connection could be having problems or you need to upgrade to more bandwidth, or least probably the ISP is having problems in its connection to other ISPs.

  3. And finally, if response times don't change in step 2, then it's very likely that your ISP is throttling bandwidth to specific types of traffic (BitTorrent, online games, etc.).

Pang
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jcbermu
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  • How do I ping google or my router – Adam Smith Jun 01 '15 at 11:17
  • @AdamSmith - Just ping the address of your router and/or IP address owned by Google. How you ping an IP address is well documented. – Ramhound Jun 01 '15 at 11:20
  • Actually, when I ping google I sometimes get 250ms ping for like 1 second then it goes back to 32ms – Adam Smith Jun 01 '15 at 11:21
  • @AdamSmith Check this: http://www.wikihow.com/Ping-an-IP-Address – jcbermu Jun 01 '15 at 11:22
  • @AdamSmith Then your problem is almost certainly not related to DNS, and using a different recursive DNS resolver won't do anything to improve the situation at all. – user Jun 01 '15 at 11:25
  • @AdamSmith ping your router and from the results of it and the google ping (250ms ping for like 1 second then it goes back to 32ms) you will know if it's a LAN problem or an outside problem. – jcbermu Jun 01 '15 at 11:27
  • @AdamSmith If you're on wifi, in my own experience, that's usually the cause of frequently *inconsistent* (not necessarily high) ping times to the router (but do the test jcbermu just mentioned first), especially if you're in an area with a lot of interference. – Jason C Jun 01 '15 at 11:30
  • I don't consider 250 ms ping times high. They are not the greatest, but they could be worst, you are basically talking about 1/4 of a second. If this is on a wireless connection, a good majority of that time, is likely spent within his own network. – Ramhound Jun 01 '15 at 11:33
  • @jcbermu It might also be worth a brief, simplified mention in the answer that OSes generally cache DNS lookups for a while, too, so even slow lookups become a relative non-issue for hosts that are already cached (e.g. when you're navigating pages on a web site, it's only really looked up the first time you hit the host, and every few minutes/hours or so after that). Although on the other hand the purpose is really to highlight the misconception, so maybe that's distracting. I dunno. – Jason C Jun 01 '15 at 11:33
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    @AdamSmith, try doing a traceroute to Google to find which routers lie between you and them, then try pinging each router between your computer and Google's server. You should be able to identify where in the path that extra lag is being introduced. – Alex D Jun 01 '15 at 12:58
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    @Ramhound: The perceived slowness of wireless networks is due to high packet loss, not high latency. Pinging your router under normal conditions should return `<1ms` on wireless just as on wired. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jun 01 '15 at 13:55