14 DAY TRIAL // Google puts speed high on its agenda, from its web browser, to its web apps, to the underlying technology it uses to serve data to millions of people everyday. But it can only do so much with its own products and many times the issues affecting the performance of its apps are out of its hands. That isn't stopping it though, as Google has several teams working on speeding up the Internet as a whole. One that it focused on lately is DNS performance. It recently launched its own DNS service and now it's proposing an update on the DNS protocol, which it claims will make the technology faster for the end user.
Along with a group of DNS and content providers, including Neustar/UltraDNS, Google proposes that information regarding a user's location be sent further upstream to DNS resolvers so that they return the address of a server associated with a domain which is closer to that location.
"By returning different addresses to requests coming from different places, DNS can be used to load balance traffic and send users to a nearby server. For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City. If you look up www.google.com from the Netherlands, the result could be an IP address pointing to a server in the Netherlands. Sending you to a nearby server improves speed, latency, and network utilization," Wilmer van der Gaast and Carlo Contavalli on behalf of the Google Public DNS team explain.
In the current system, the IP of your DNS provider is used to determine your location. This works well most of the times, as the DNS resolver is usually close to your location. This may not always be the case though and your request may be linked to a server further away than it could have been leading to poorer performance for you and avoidable network congestion.
In the proposed system, part of your IP address, the first three octets, will be sent upstream to the authoritative nameservers which will enable them to find the server closest to your location. The partial information will be enough to determine your location, but not enough to pose a threat to your privacy, Google says. The company hopes that in a few months time the proposal will be approved. You can read the entire document here.