Sure, but i have a
windows box and would like to stay that way for the moment.
In any case i have found a free
DNS cache called
AnalogX FastCache. It's a cpl of yrs old but does the trick.
Initial impressions so far are good. You have to set your primary DNS server to be the localhost or 127.0.0.1 and the secondary as ur ISP's primary DNS server. You can set the cache time to 7 days in the cache, meaning an address that was resolved will stay for upto 7 days..this is configurable to any amount of days you like.
Since i'm on win2k, there was a prob with entering 127.0.0.1 as primary DNS server (most other versions of windows won't have a prob) so i set it using the registry.
It has a cpl of interesting features
- showing you how much time was saved using FastCache, in a half-hour of playing it saved me 180ms...lol I expect this to rise in the future.
- it has a tandem feature, that sends requests to both your ISPs primary & secondary and selects the faster of the two.
Have a play with it, and let us know what u think.
If you are still not convinced why a DNS cache will be helpful here's what the author says (note this applies to any DNS cache)
At it's core, FastCache really is a simple caching DNS proxy server - it sits between programs on your computer accessing the Internet and the DNS servers that map domain names to IP addresses. Normally a DNS query happens very quickly, in the neighborhood of around a couple hundred milliseconds - that's roughly a tenth or twentieth of a second. This means that the first time you go to a certain domain, it takes the normal amount of time to look up the domain name, but each subsequent time you return should be instant (as long as it remains in the cache). But what good is saving a FRACTION of a second!?!?
In and of itself, not of much value at all, but the beauty of DNS is that you don't normally just make a couple of requests a day - with normal browsing you can literally make hundreds of requests, and that starts to add up.
The biggest reason this will always buy you a time savings is because many domains are configured with timeout periods which are very small, some as little as a couple seconds, some a few minutes to an hour, with the rest normally in the one day range. Since FastCache can override the normal timeout period, you can help to eliminate duplicate requests.
