The best I've found so far is 50ms for "time host smugmug.com usw6.akam.net". Does everyone just run their primary dns servers at 100% CPU or something? - Sanjeev Singh

It has nothing to do with the endpoints - Google answers requests very quickly. One issue is that many caching nameservers do run at crazy high CPU because the ISP doesn't care if it's not an uptime issue. Also Internet UDP is truly unreliable (high drop rate) and retries are delayed by a long timeout. TCP requires connection setup. :-( - Daniel Dulitz

I discovered some issues with my methodology. "host" by default does a bunch of other crap that requires talking to isp DNS servers susceptible to the issues Daniel is talking about. dig @nameserver domain is much better. I get 5ms for dig @usw6.akam.net smugmug.com and 21ms for dig @ns1.google.com google.com. We're trying to figure out who provides the best dns servers :). - Private Sanjeev

dig even reports the query time for you. The difference between the recursive (and caching) bind instance in my house and going to google's name servers directly is approx 20msec. - Andy Bakun

i'm getting 175ms ping to ns1.google.com and 243ms to friendfeed.com (avgerages of four) - i have noticed the backwards bug motion for dns activity a lot tonight w/ friendfeed. i'm using opendns - Chris Heath

backwards bug motion in chrome that is - Chris Heath

From home, I'm getting 30ms ping times and 34ms DNS query times to ns1.google.com, and 11ms DNS query times to usw6.akam.net for smugmug.com (akam.net doesn't answer ICMP echo). Whoever has the best connectivity can win here. - Daniel Dulitz

Best? I have 0.130ms best, 0.191ms avg to www.yelp.com. - Andy Bakun

I take that back, I have 0.034ms best and 0.041 avg to www.yelp.com. - Andy Bakun

On, and by the way, the pings are COMING FROM INSIDE THE NETWORK... so I cheated. - Andy Bakun

Chris, what is "backwards bug motion"? - Private Sanjeev

In chrome, when a page is loading the tab has a 'bug' like other browsers do that moves to let you know that the page is processing. In chrome the bug just moves in a circle where the favicon ends up after the page loads. It moves clockwise and counterclockwise. Counterclockwise (or backwards) is when the dns is loading, and then it will switch to clockwise (forwards motion) when the page itself is loading. ... you usually will only be able to see the 'backwards'/counterclockwise motion if dns is slow (like it was on monday) since a normal dns lookup is only a split second the 'bug' doesn't move perceptively in the counterclockwise direction - Chris Heath

`host google.com ns1.google.com` might takes 100ms But `google.com/search?q=google` takes 5ms. Moving the bottleneck from db query to nslookup may be considered as a success ;-) - Tzury Bar Yochay

Dawn, try the friendfeed feedback room http://friendfeed.com/friendf... or the spam report room http://friendfeed.com/friendf... - Chris Heath