DNS Benchmark. And the winner is....

When was the last time you thought about how fast your DNS queries were occurring? I will be the first to tell you that it hadn't crossed my mind in a while, but after Google recently announced a public DNS service I was curious to see how it stacked up against my current provider, Comcast. I must admit I almost changed my DNS settings blindly and was glad I didn't after running a few benchmarks.

Now a few of you may be asking why do I care and Google provides a great answer "The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day." Google's pitch to try their service is based on the expectations that you will get a speed improvement, better security, and absolutely no redirection. I will leave the security claim to others and agree they have no redirection. My main focus was, can it make my browsing experience faster?

Now everyone's results will vary so before you decide to start changing your DNS servers make sure you see who offers the best performance and offers the services, availability, etcetera that you expect. Below are my results for comparison and to see what to expect.

My local providers (Comcast) DNS services outperformed the closest competitor (OpenDNS) by 29%. As you can see from the results Google wasn't even in the top 5! I had anticipated a better showing from a performance perspective from the Google offerings. Even without the performance impact you may wish to use a DNS server outside of your ISP for other reasons, such as URL blocking. Now this is a very narrow test, using only 15,052 URLs to lookup and was limited to a small window of time. I would be curious to see this test executed over a longer period of time and see if the results stick.

The DNS protocol is an important part of the web's infrastructure, serving as the Internet's phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.
	Why should you try Google Public DNS? By using Google Public DNS you can: Speed up your browsing experience. Improve your security. Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

Google Delivers New Systems Programming Language - Go

What is the purpose of the project?

No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends:

• Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster.
• Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation.
• There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and C++, pushing people towards dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript.
• Some fundamental concepts such as garbage collection and parallel computation are not well supported by popular systems languages.
• The emergence of multicore computers has generated worry and confusion.

We believe it's worth trying again with a new language, a concurrent, garbage-collected language with fast compilation. Regarding the points above:

• It is possible to compile a large Go program in a few seconds on a single computer.
• Go provides a model for software construction that makes dependency analysis easy and avoids much of the overhead of C-style include files and libraries.
• Go's type system has no hierarchy, so no time is spent defining the relationships between types. Also, although Go has static types the language attempts to make types feel lighter weight than in typical OO languages.
• Go is fully garbage-collected and provides fundamental support for concurrent execution and communication.
• By its design, Go proposes an approach for the construction of system software on multicore machines.

Now before you go running off to write the next big thing, remember Google says:

Go is an experiment. The implementation isn't quite mature enough yet for large-scale production use.

Google Tech Talk: National Security and Web 2.0

If your in the DC Area and are interested in how the military and intelligence communities are utilizing Web 2.0 technologies you should definitely check out this talk.

Web 2.0 technologies are changing the way the military and intelligence community operate.

The military is gradually turning to Web-based, collaborative technologies to aid combat operations. Soldiers in Iraq have used CAVNET, an interactive community hosted on the military's secure intranet, to share knowledge acquired while on patrol.

Meanwhile, the intelligence community has adopted wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools to organize and share information. Intellipedia, a classified wiki aimed at helping analysts share intelligence, is used by tens of thousands of individuals from the 16 intelligence agencies and other national security-related organizations.

This talk is being hosted at Google DC on Friday, June 12, 2009 from 10:00am - 11:15am and will be moderated by Jim Young.

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