5 ms·
> Rethink's server processed DNS requests in 40-60ms, which could potentially make a new webpage render up to 50ms slower the first time, while the system defau
by ignoramous 1y ago
> Rethink's server processed DNS requests in 40-60ms, which could potentially make a new webpage render up to 50ms slower the first time, while the system default took just 5-10ms
You can choose "system default" in the Rethink Android app from Configure -> DNS -> System DNS. You don't have to use Rethink's DoH (DNS over HTTPS) / DoT (DNS over TLS) servers. You can setup any DNSCrypt, Oblivious DoH, or plain old DNS endpoint with Rethink to forward DNS requests to.
> I chose AdAway and have stuck to that choice for now
A decent choice.
A word of caution when using it in non-root mode, though: AdAway borrows code from another (now discontinued but pretty solid) project viz. DNS66. From when I looked at the code, DNS66 never handled DNS over TCP. You can test this with Termux: dig +tcp example.com A.
> doubt their choice of implementing something so performance-critical as a DNS server in JavaScript
For a remotely-hosted DNS resolver, network latency & concurrency is likely to dominate than performance of the code itself. You're right that JS is slow (as compared to Rust, say), but looking at metrics from serving 300m to 3bn queries/day on Cloudflare, our median (CPU time) spent processing a DNS request was consistently less than 2ms, and IO wait (there are no "disks" so, this is mostly hitting the caches or upstream resolvers) was estimated to be less than 7ms.
Also, we employ a bunch of optimizations on client & the server, as appropriate (if we're missing any we should implement, let us know).
- Coalesce multiple requests into one upstream request: For example, if there's 40 clients all wanting to resolve the same domain (say, ipv4only.arpa) within milliseconds of each other, only one request is upstreamed.
- Utilize in-process LFU cache and Cloudflare's Cache API to avoid upstreaming where possible.
- Connection pool egress to avoid reconnect overheads.
- Race response for a query from multiple upstreams in parallel.
- Support TLS session resumption.
- Prefer the lighter TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 cipher suite.
- Dynamically adjust the TLS frame size. DNS queries aren't that big.
- Disable Nagling on TCP.
- Rehydrate responses for top domains stored in the in-process cache in the background.
- Admission Control (load shedding) & queuing disciplines (CoDel etc)
---
> curl -w "DNS Time: %{time_namelookup}s\nConnect: %{time_connect}s\nTotal: %{time_total}s\n" -H "accept: application/dns-message" -H "content-type: application/dns-message" --data "<binary-data>" -o nul -s 1.1.1.1
Shouldn't the switch "-s" be "https://one.one.one.one/dns-query https://one.one.one.one/dns-query"? For DoH perf specifically, I use https://github.com/ameshkov/godnsbench https://github.com/ameshkov/godnsbench as it supports parallel and cache-busting (random) queries.
Ex:
Rethink on Workers:
./godnsbench -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query -p 10 -c 300 -t 1 -q {random}.dnsleaktest.com
godnsbench with the following configuration:
{
"Address": "https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query",
"Connections": 10,
"Timeout": 1,
"QueriesCount": 300,
}
The test results are:
Elapsed: 6.120078941s
Average QPS: 49.018394
Processed queries: 300
Average per query: 20.400765ms
Errors count: 0
Cloudflare 1.1.1.1:
./godnsbench -a https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query -p 10 -c 300 -t 1 -q {random}.dnsleaktest.com
godnsbench with the following configuration:
{
"Address": "https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query",
"Connections": 10,
"Timeout": 1,
"QueriesCount": 300,
}
The test results are:
Elapsed: 6.780474724s
Average QPS: 44.244383
Processed queries: 299
Average per query: 22.677588ms
Errors count: 1
- maxloh 1y agoI was able to reproduce your results with the provided command. In that case, Rethink DNS is 1-2 ms faster than Cloudflare DNS. However, the provided command actually runs 300 queries in a really short timeframe (specified by -c 300), which is very different from real-world use cases — in most cases, we look up a domain only once, and the result is cached by the OS. If we set the count parameter to 1 (closer to the mentioned real-world use cases), we can reproduce the result in my comment above. Rethink DNS actually takes 450 ms to return a response. ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/04 23:22:47 [info] Average per query: 452.3948ms With Cloudflare DNS, it takes only 35 ms, even when using DNS over HTTPS. ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://cloudflare-dns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/04 23:22:49 [info] Average per query: 34.4343ms As sky.rethinkdns.com is hosted on Cloudflare, there shouldn't be any notable network differences between Rethink DNS and Cloudflare DNS. If you inspect the list of servers in the following two lists, they are almost identical. - https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://sky.rethinkdns.com https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://sky.rethinkdn... - https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://cloudflare-dns.com https://check-host.net/check-ping?host=https://cloudflare-dn... If CPU time isn't the bottleneck of response time, any idea what the reason is behind the difference in response time?
- e12e 1y agoReally appreciate both of you commenting here. Could the ~430ms be startup time for a sleeping worker? Or is it the cost for a cache miss? Ed: hm, I suppose google.com should pretty much always be a cache hit... Unless they have some really strange TTLs?
- maxloh 1y agoActually, 450 ms was already a cache hit. The response time would be 530 ms on the first query of google.com: ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/05 02:50:14 [info] Average per query: 532.1144ms Subsequent queries for google.com within a few minutes would result in a slightly shorter response time, like my second comment above. ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/05 02:50:48 [info] Average per query: 468.5749ms ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a https://sky.rethinkdns.com/dns-query ... 2025/05/05 02:55:04 [info] Average per query: 472.1229ms Some of the lengthy response times originate from the overhead of DNS over HTTPS. If we switch to the DNS over TLS version of Rethink DNS, there will be about a 240-320 ms improvement in response time. ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a tls://max.rethinkdns.com ... 2025/05/05 02:50:26 [info] Average per query: 290.4762ms ./godnsbench -c 1 -q google.com -a tls://max.rethinkdns.com ... 2025/05/05 02:50:51 [info] Average per query: 145.1868ms However, 290ms is still quite a large delay for DNS queries, which makes webpage rendering a quarter of a second slower the first time you visit it.