Is changing the DNS on your router still a thing?

[d000hg]

I've been having issues with high ping and failed page loads the last week or so on my Fibre (FTTC level 1 ~40mbps) connection. The speed is pretty decent for streaming but I keep getting web pages not loading or seeing images in pages not load, and my normally very stable 15/16ms ping periodically jumping to 100-500ms - I run a constant ping to Google as a monitor.

Since I work via RDP, latency is a big deal - keyboard/mouse lag is a PITA.

I used to get this issue years ago quite often where I often had to reload a page as it wouldn't work the first time, and I'm sure one thing we did was change the DNS on the router so it would use a different server. But this might have been in the days of ADSL and I'm not sure it's still relevant. Anyone?

[ladymuck]

It's worth doing as a diagnostic step

[gables]

And if you can't do it on the router (like me with BT) you'll need to set it on the device, in my case PC, to override the ISP one.

[Protagoras]

I've been having issues with high ping and failed page loads the last week or so on my Fibre (FTTC level 1 ~40mbps) connection. The speed is pretty decent for streaming but I keep getting web pages not loading or seeing images in pages not load, and my normally very stable 15/16ms ping periodically jumping to 100-500ms - I run a constant ping to Google as a monitor.

A basic step, but it's worth clearing DNS cache on impacted devices when investigating possible DNS issues.

I use pi-hole (from pi-hole.net) as my local DNS, blocking unwanted content does seem to speed things up ...

[Lance]

DNS has nothing to do with latency.
It does a lookup once and once the TCP socket is established for the RDP connection it won't do another lookup.

You are barking up the wrong tree.

[DealorNoDeal]

Unfortunately, when you connect to a server on the internet, through an ISP, there's a shed load of networking between you and the server.

Although the Windows tracert command won't show details of many of the hops (most will be "* * *"), it will give an indication of how many there are. (BTW, there's a freeware command tracetcp which does reveal the details.)

If you could see just how much kit you're going through, you wouldn't be too surprised that latency is a bit variable.

[d000hg]

DNS has nothing to do with latency.
It does a lookup once and once the TCP socket is established for the RDP connection it won't do another lookup.

You are barking up the wrong tree.

When two things go wrong at the same time, it's rarely unrelated though. When I start getting DNS misses trying to load a web-page, this is typically the same time my ping slows right down as reported by: ping -t google.com. I don't know if ping is actually resolving google.com every time or not - I might check if a ping of the naked url shows the same degradation.

As you say RDP has nothing to do with DNS (nobody claimed otherwise) so maybe my service is generally suffering. But DNS failures is a PITA as you have to keep double-loading pages.