ISP slow dns servers at AirTel

Priya Ranjan Singh — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 13:58:34 +0000

I've been using Internet for long and it feels slow long before ping reports packet drops or streaming shows loader. It feels sluggish, but when ISP tech support is puzzled too, it leaves me to look deeper.

After struggling with the slow ISP AirTel, I wondered what really is slow from technical aspect and I wanted to see if the dns server was upto the mark. I'm looking at the router config and it shows 125.22.47.100 (2401:4900:50:9::280) - we'd stick to the IPv4 version for a while. Checking for one lookups seemed non conclusive so I wanted to test it for a bigger list this time. I'm on a macOS so flushing dns would be a step too. So I could think of the test to be as go to a list of 500 domains, look up every domain name, and measure the complete time taken to do so. And then repeat it with cloudflare dns 1.1.1.1.

The list should be the first thing. Somewhere on Internet, Moz has a great list of 500 domains, also downloadable as csv. After cleaning up the list looks like:

www.google.com
www.blogger.com
youtube.com
microsoft.com
apple.com
...

I made a copy at github gist for reference.

Next is to feed this list to dig - a dns lookup utility on unix machines.

dig -f hostnames.txt +noall +stats
-f to feed the long list of 500 domain names
+noall to suppress default list of outputs
+stats to show stats that includes resolution time

To sum up all time taken by the command, a time command is handy.

dig -f hostnames.txt +noall +stats
0.07s user 0.13s system 0% cpu 3:40.70 total
So 3 mins 40s. Okay.

How would 1.1.1.1 do:
dig @1.1.1.1 -f hostnames.txt +noall +stats
0.06s user 0.10s system 0% cpu 31.568 total
31s.

That is 7x faster, or Airtel's 125.22.47.100 is 7x slower.

The real problem is if I change dns on the router to forget about the problem, AirTel makes it a point to disconnect service and it is all unusable - don't understand this part very well but it is probably to discourage using public dns.

Anyway, for now it confirms this dns is 7x slow.

I just heard about golang

Priya Ranjan Singh — Fri, 14 May 2021 04:16:33 +0000

I have a lot of experience being an average engineer building frontend applications for a long time. I still spend a lot of time reading hacker news and opinions of other people in conference talks about topics about engineering and managing web apps across the stack. I heard repeatedly that golang is easy to learn, and when I looked deeper I found the makers of golang emphasize on the idea that they don't believe in adding features to the language to stay upto date. An example being there isn't a need of while loop when a for loop is present. They have a general opinion that by keeping the language robust and finite, it is possible to learn it quick and build abstractions in the language to handle concerns. This is of course possible in every language by selecting a subset of features to code in and build right abstractions to progress well. I somehow vibe with the idea and using this constraint as a guiding principle. Using a few things well is so far more important than having plenty of options at disposal. Alright, easy to learn is good. So I looked more, and I heard too many new things and it makes me curious to learn more.

DEV Community: Priya Ranjan Singh

ISP slow dns servers at AirTel

I just heard about golang