"that has the well-traveled internet in its cache" I have the well-traveled internet in my HOSTS file. No DNS lookups, recursive or not, is always faster than

"that has the well-traveled internet in its cache" I have the well-traveled internet in my HOSTS file. No DNS lookups, recursive or not, is always faster than 1 or more. When this sort of discussion comes up, I always ponder the number of IP addresses that constitutes the "traveled internet" for any given user. I believe it is a relatively small number. The truth is, unless you are running internet-wide scans or something, you will only visit a small fraction of the total IP address space in your lifetime. And in my case I believe I can store all those IP addresses, in additon to a large number of addresses I might visit, on my own personal storage. I'd imagine I visit more addresses than the average user, so the number becomes even smaller in that case. Another thing I'll mention is an article on the Cisco website from a number of years back where someone claimed that the optimum number of users for a DNS cache is only, if I recall correctly, about 10. I'd say it's healthy to check your assumptions. You might find that large shared DNS caches, like the ones offered by ISP's or "open resolvers", are not always faster than the alternatives for all queries. Believe me, I do a lot of experimenting with caches in additon to using authoritative queries, local authoritative servers and /etc/hosts. Despite what theory and logic suggest, caches are not always faster across all lookups. If there were hard and fast rules about how to configure DNS to minimize the number lookups and make DNS as efficient as possible, and everyone followed them, then maybe things would be different. As a simple example, try counting the number of queries required to resolve a host when Akamai is used. I don't care what the large, shared cache of the "well-traveled internet" has, because I already have all the fully resolved Akamai IP numbers where the content resides in my local storage. And if one location is slow I can manually choose another.