WinXP tip of the day #6

[brainsoft]

Little browsing tweak for y'all. My firewall does this for me as well, so I personally didn't notice a difference, but give it a shot for yourself!

6) XP browsing speed up tweak
when you connect to a web site your computer sends information back and forth, this is obvious. Some of this information deals with resolving the site name to an IP address, the stuff that tcp/ip really deals with, not words. This is DNS information and is used so that you will not need to ask for the site location each and every time you visit the site. Although WinXP and win2000 has a pretty efficient DNS cache, you can increase its overall performance by increasing its size.

You can do this with the registry entries below:

************begin copy and paste***********
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters]
"CacheHashTableBucketSize"=dword:00000001
"CacheHashTableSize"=dword:00000180
"MaxCacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000fa00
"MaxSOACacheEntryTtlLimit"=dword:0000012d

************end copy and paste***********

make a new text file and rename it to dnscache.reg. The copy and paste the above into it and save it. Then merge it into the registry.

 

[fury]

This tweak could save me a lot of waiting as I constantly see the thing looking up every dns I go to and taking 2-3 or sometimes even 10 seconds to find the DNS. Thanks

I'll let you know after a few days of using it.

 

[a13antichrist]

Sweet.
How many firewall programs are likely to do this?

 

[brainsoft]

No idea =)

 

[fury]

I got something that is somewhat related to this tweak.

Restarting the DNS client and forcing it to update DNS cache
In case your DNS cache becomes persistent and keeps retrieving DNS names from the cache instead of looking them up again, this tweak is for you.

You must be logged in as an administrator to do this.

Go to Control Panel \ Administrative Tools \ Services

Right click on DNS Client and select Stop. It will bring up a window that will appear briefly, showing the progress on stopping the client. Right after this window closes, right click on DNS Client again and select Start.

It should then force a re-lookup for any programs requesting a DNS lookup. This tweak is useful when you are certain a domain name points to a new IP but you still have the old IP in your cache.

 

[fury]

I've never had the problems with the DNS cache in 2k that I have had with XP. Only more reason to stick with 2k, I guess