Posted by kglee | Filed under Software Fixes
The Microsoft Windows operating system stores all DNS look-ups in a cache to speed up the connection for future visits to previously visited websites or servers. DNS for simplifications sake turns domain names like ghacks.net into IP addresses like 96.30.22.116. To simplify it further: computer users make almost exclusive use of domain names, while computers and devices of IP addresses.
The DNS provider is queried during each connection attempt unless the information are already stored in the cache.
You may want to know why someone would want to flush the DNS cache? Lets say you have decided to switch from your provider’s DNS server to Open DNS, Google DNS or another free service that promise faster speeds and little extras like user-configured site filtering. If you switch during a session, you will be using old data from the cache if you access sites that you have already visited.
Not a big problem? You may be right, but think about the following situation. A webmaster migrates the website to a new server. It can take up to 48 hours before all DNS servers redirect users to the website on the new server and not the old server. Some webmasters change their DNS server before migrating if the ISP’s DNS server is known to be on the slow site when it comes to updating information (another option for webmasters is to edit the hosts file).
The DNS cache can have privacy implications as well, especially on public computer systems or multi-user systems. It is possible to display the contents of the cache, which in turn reveals all the websites that have been visited by the user in the session. Flushing the cache removes the entries so that the next user won’t be able to see a list of visited websites.
Flushing the DNS Cache
Posted by kglee | Filed under Software Fixes
We all know by now how tweaking our operating systems (I’m lumping in Linux into this catagory) can help speed up our systems. We also know applying various networking tweaks to our operating systems can also speed up our web browsing experience but, outside of our OS’s we really have no control over anything outside of our routers. Or do we? Is there a way to make web browsing faster without having to dig into the Windows Registry? Can you speed up a Linux system by changing just a couple of DNS settings? Yep, you sure can!
What Exactly Is DNS
The “official” definition (via Wikipedia) – “It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participants. Most importantly, it translates domain names meaningful to humans into the numerical (binary) identifiers associated with networking equipment for the purpose of locating and addressing these devices worldwide. An often used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the “phone book” for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses.”
http://forums.winxpcentral.com/showthread.php?p=55324#post55324