Found a weird DNS trick that fixed my client's slow network

Had a small law office in Austin that kept complaining about slow internet, but speed tests looked fine. After 3 days of checking everything I finally noticed their DNS was timing out on every lookup. Switched them to 1.1.1.1 instead of their ISP's default and now pages load in under 2 seconds. Has anyone else seen weird DNS issues with Spectrum in that area?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan_brown3011d ago

Rowanhernandez I've seen Spectrum's DNS in Austin flat out fail on IPv6 queries specifically, which wouldn't show up in a basic speed test but makes every page load hang while it tries and falls back. That might explain the "3 days" part if they had v6 enabled and nobody thought to check dual-stack behavior.

evahenderson11d ago

Wait, so @rowanhernandez would rather spend 3 days troubleshooting than just flip the DNS setting? Sounds like a real commitment to making things harder than they need to be. Spectrum's DNS failing on IPv6 sounds like peak "we'll fix it next quarter" energy though, so maybe he's got a point after all.

rowanhernandez11d ago

3 days of troubleshooting just to swap a DNS server? feels like you could have tried that on day one lol. i mean yeah, slow DNS can wreck page loads but most ISP defaults are at least functional enough to not cause constant 2 second delays. plus if speed tests are fine but browsing is slow that's literally the first thing you check, not something you stumble on after 3 days. either you were overthinking it or Spectrum's DNS in Austin is actually that broken which would surprise me because most of their issues are with peering, not DNS. still, good to know for anyone dealing with that specific setup I guess.