Google Public DNS Handles 70B Requests Daily

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) said Feb. 14 that its public Domain Name System (DNS) now processes over 70 billion requests each day, making it the largest public DNS service in the world.

Domain Name Systems translate computer host names into IP addresses, serving as phone directories for the Web.

The DNS translates alphabetical domain names humans associate with Websites online into the numerical identifiers associated with networking equipment to locate and address computers, tablets and other computing machines. For example, www.google.com becomes the IP address 74.125.45.100.

Millions of users are accessing the Web several times a day, triggering multiple DNS requests for streaming video, social networks and multiplayer online games. This can bog down the Web page rendering process, which means users are sitting at their computers, waiting to view Web pages.

To address this issue, Google launched its free Public DNS in December 2009 as a bid to help Web pages load faster.

Google’s public DNS now gets nearly 70 percent of its traffic from outside the United States, covering South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, India, Japan and Nigeria.

The company is also active in trying to improve interaction between public DNS systems. Google proposed edns-client-subnet as a way to more efficiently pass data to content delivery networks, which will send users to servers nearby.

For example, if you look up www.google.com from a computer in New York, it may resolve to an IP address pointing to a server in New York City, which will ideally improve speed, latency and network utilization.

Members of the Internet Engineering Task Force are discussing the standard proposal with which companies, such as OpenDNS, Edgecast, Comodo and others, are experimenting as part of the Global Internet Speedup effort.

Public DNS is one of several tacks Google is taking to “make the Web faster,” as one of the company’s mantras has become.

Google is also experimenting with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to speed up data packets traversing the Internet between computers and servers.

Google is also testing the TCP Fast Open (TFO) approach, which it said reduces page load time by 10 percent on average, and as much as 40 percent on other instances.