[lug] Traceroute question

[D. Stimits]

Michael Deck wrote:
> 
...
> True. The real problem is DNS lookups. Apps like nslookup and Netscape seem
> to be timing out waiting for name resolution and I'm thinking that this
> might be contributing to the problem. If it turns out that ISDN was giving
> me poor throughput on large transfers but great DNS and small-packet rates,
> then I'm probably going back to ISDN because most of what I seem to be
> doing is lots and lots of small packets (e.g. every little bitmap on the
> slashdot main page) and the startup effects are gonna kill me not to
> mention the DNS failures.
> 

One thing you can use as a test is to do nslookup on IP's you are
working with, and compare your application performance when using
dotted-decimal format, with performance using named ip's. DNS lookup
itself has a huge number of items that can change its performance
(machine load, caching, further queries to the next DNS server, so on).