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A very wide question.

I mean, if you have DNS Records for Ads for example pointing to a nonexistent area or localpc then yes you'd save a TINY amount of bandwidth. Otherwise, DNS is just what points google.com to 173.194.36.104.

I am asking as I was having some issues viewing videos from youtube, I googled and some recommended changing the DNS. so, I switched from my ISP DNS to OpenDNS for testing only, and I can see a improvements in viewing the flash videos in youtube. Thats why I was wondering.

Thanks guys for the quick answer.

  On 19/08/2010 at 10:38, deep1234 said:

Hi guys, I am wondering can the DNS limit the bandwidth to a website? lets says for youtube for example?

I think we could all come up with better advice if you stated whether you are trying to achieve limiting bandwidth or trying to overcome it...

answered above as my post was being posted

Please ignore..

  On 19/08/2010 at 10:59, deep1234 said:

I am asking as I was having some issues viewing videos from youtube, I googled and some recommended changing the DNS. so, I switched from my ISP DNS to OpenDNS for testing only, and I can see a improvements in viewing the flash videos in youtube. Thats why I was wondering.

Thanks guys for the quick answer.

Well it depends on what you mean by issues.

A DNS server has one single purpose, and that is to translate a hostname (like google.com) to an IP address. That is all it does. Your browser connects to the DNS server, sends "google.com," gets back "123.123.123.123," then disconnects. That's all the interaction it does with the DNS server. The browser then goes on to connect to 123.123.123.123, which is the actual Google server. These are two separate and unrelated sessions.

Since the browser requires the IP address, this step is necessary. If the DNS server was slow, then this initial step would take longer, but it would not affect the connection to the IP address (which comes after your browser has disconnected from the DNS server.)

Now, there is a theoretical way the DNS server can affect performance. It could have cached information that is out of date, so that the IP address your browser gets back from it points to an old broken server. This is pretty rare.

Another thing is that a hostname can have multiple IP addresses. When your browser connects to google.com, it might get 10 IP addresses back. It then generally tries the IP address that is at the top of the list first. This can be taken advantage of to spread the load over multiple servers by rotating the list. Every time you ask for the IP addresses, the order of the list different. The result is even though the hostname is the same, you're actually connecting to a different server each time. This is known as round-robin DNS.

That's the only ways the DNS server can (indirectly) affect things. The DNS server can't affect the speed the video downloads or streams at, only which servers you end up connecting to and how long it takes to connect to them. Of course if the video was divided into chunks that were downloaded separately, maybe even from different servers, then I suppose it could affect things even after the initial connection, but I don't know if Google does anything like that.

Other unrelated things that can affect Youtube are things like which server you are being served by (some are under more load than others) and which physical route the signal takes you to (the available bandwidth can vary).

well if your dns server is slow to respond, then yes initially getting to a website would be slow and possibly initial load (getting to) a video would be slow. Trying a different dns server would get around the slow to respond issue, but it can not limit your speed, just your initial connection to whatever.

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