<grrrrrrrrrrr> On Thu, 20 May 2010, Jay Daley wrote, quoting the Commerce Commission:
"The DNS performance from remote test sites to the ISPs tested in all cities shows that webpage loading is slower the further the user is from the Auckland based DNS."
That's probably true, but it has nothing to do with user experience: the round-trip time from Dunedin to Auckland for a DNS query is going to be completely swamped by the time to fetch the contents of the page, which is likely going to have to come from California. And they go on to say... "The test results shown in Figure 15 demonstrate DNS delays of 41ms to 70ms for Dunedin users. Subject to browser type, that could mean, for example, a delay of 70ms x 100 files, or 7 seconds, before a page completes loading." ... which is complete balderdash. Firstly, nobody make a page that loads objects from 100 different domains, and all browsers cache DNS results internally (often beyond the declared TTL!). Secondly all recent browsers both render progressively, and parallelize loading of subordinate objects. Thirdly, it would mean that in everyone in Auckland would be seeing 4.1 seconds for the same page, and they're not.
This implies that all ISPs have their caching DNS resolvers based in Auckland.
It *states* that they're all in Auckland, which probably true, but it does not offer any rationale to support the conclusion (that it's because of the location of the DNS resolvers). I'm going to stop reading the report now; it's getting bad for my blood pressure. </grrrrrrrrrrr> -Martin