I recently "upgraded" an old Linksys WRT54G to a E2500. I normally set the router (192.168.1.1) as the primary DNS, using the DHCP static DNS settings. The assumption being that the router's internal DNS is always going to be faster than taking trip onto the WAN.

I also use namebench from google to identify the the best set of servers for secondary and tertiary.

To my surprise namebench reported back that OpenDNS was 2x faster than then the E2500 internal DNS! 46ms versus 87ms avg response. Even min and max times were worse. The same run with the WRT54G, came in with sub 20ms DNS responses.

Any idea what could be slowing my E2500 down? Google search turns up nothing but how-to configure the static DNS on the router.

Congrats. People are either unhappy with their WRT54G, all four I (ab)used were utter crap w/o exception, or they are not. Note the E2500 is a less powerful version of the E3200 though and that will show when comparing features and throughput.


That assumption will is only true if either stock Linksys firmware or DD-WRT provides DNS-caching with say dnsmasq. Best check by logging in over serial, SSH, telnet or whatever else interface it provides to running system utilities. And even though a router may run dnsmasq, running a persistent-caching DNS server on one of your LAN machines may still be a choice for maintenance, auditing, performance and other reasons.


//NTLB