I walked into my office after lunch and my internet connection was down. WTF? How can it be down. Well, turns out the internet is just fine, but the Comcast DNS servers are either not responding, or are running really slow. I made a quick configuration change to use Google’s new public DNS system and web pages are loading faster than ever.

A few people have reported that Google’s DNS servers run a little slower than most ISPs. Well that may be true, but if your ISP has flakey DNS servers (as Comcast does) then Google is likely a better option. Also, Google is supposed to be better at dealing with cache misses, which is one of the biggest performance culprits.

Oh, and I checked Google’s privacy policy before I made this change. If they’re telling the truth they seem to be being good stewards of the DNS data.

Their DNS server IP addresses are:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4