namehelp

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

namehelp improved web performance by obtaining more accurate redirections to nearby content delivery network servers. In short: it helped whenever you, or your ISP, used a remote DNS service.

The Problem

DNS is the Internet’s phone book, and it is invisible to almost everyone. Every site you visit, every message you send, begins with a lookup; a complex page may need dozens, and a browser may perform hundreds in a day. Most people never think about it, because their ISP provides the service transparently.

Over the preceding years, third-party public DNS services from Google, OpenDNS and Norton had become popular, and for good reasons — better security, better privacy, faster resolution. Through a large-scale study spanning over 10,000 hosts in nearly 100 countries, we found that while public DNS may indeed resolve names faster, web performance could suffer badly.

The cause is a hidden interaction with another invisible service. More than 70% of the top 1,000 websites rely on CDNs, which replicate content across thousands of servers and steer each user to a nearby copy — using the location of the user’s resolver as a proxy for the user. When the resolver is a public service somewhere else entirely, that proxy fails: users were being sent to replicas three times farther away than necessary.

CDNs and public resolvers were working on a fix, but the proposed standard had not achieved broad adoption, leaving users choosing between good web performance and the security and privacy they had switched for.

What namehelp Did

namehelp let users have both. It ran personalized benchmarks in the background, from the user’s own machine, to determine the optimal DNS configuration, and when it detected less than optimal web performance it corrected it by interacting with DNS and CDNs so content came from the nearest available replica.

Beyond benchmarking, which existing tools such as namebench and DNS Benchmark already did, namehelp added:

automatic DNS server configuration based on the sites a user actually visits
caching so frequently-visited sites resolved instantly
faster failover when a DNS server went down

It installed as a local system service — users pointed their machine at 127.0.0.1 — with browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox providing a dashboard.

The dashboard’s DNS view. In this example namehelp resolved in 9.51 ms against the network default’s 148.28 ms.

Where the gain came from: the CDN-hosted domains for which namehelp found a nearer replica.

Reception

The first release went out on 9 October 2012 for Windows, macOS and Debian/Ubuntu, with RHEL and CentOS packages following. Within a month it had 10,000 users. Coverage in McCormick News led to ACM TechNews, Computerworld and Network World, and from there to Lifehacker — which brought 2,000 new users in a single day — and on to outlets in France, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Brazil and Vietnam. Several reported the tool as speeding up web performance by 40%.

Source was released on 26 October 2012. A Firefox extension followed in 2013, a 2.0 beta for macOS in January 2018, and Namehelp Mobile brought DNS performance comparison to Android.

Privacy

The privacy policy was deliberately short: namehelp never collected personally identifiable information or the sites a user visited. Anonymous reporting — usage statistics, performance-improvement results, benchmark results for a generic set of popular sites, and results of other network measurements — could be switched off entirely.

Sinopsis y ¿por qué usar namehelp? (español)

La página original de namehelp se publicó en inglés y español. Se conserva aquí la versión en español.

Sinopsis. namehelp mejora el rendimiento web obteniendo redirecciones más apropiadas hacia servidores de contenido más cercanos. Básicamente, namehelp mejora tu rendimiento web si vos o tu proveedor de internet utiliza un servicio de DNS remoto.

¿Por qué usar namehelp? El Servicio de Nombres de Dominio (DNS) es una especie de guía telefónica para el Internet y es esencial para su funcionamiento. La mayoría de nosotros no nos percatamos de su existencia porque nuestro proveedor generalmente lo ofrece de manera transparente.

Los últimos años han visto el surgimiento de servicios de DNS público ofrecidos por compañías como Google, OpenDNS y Norton DNS, que presentan ventajas de seguridad, privacidad y velocidad de resolución. Aun así, a través de un estudio de gran escala que incluyó a más de 10,000 usuarios en más de 100 países, nuestro laboratorio descubrió que tu rendimiento web puede sufrir seriamente, aún cuando el servicio de DNS público efectivamente reduce el tiempo de resolución.

El problema se debe a la interacción del servicio DNS con las redes de entrega de contenido (redes CDN). Aproximadamente el 70% de los 1,000 sitios más populares utilizan redes CDN, que replican el contenido en miles de servidores y redireccionan a los usuarios al más cercano. La utilización de servicios de DNS público puede ocasionar que los usuarios sean redireccionados a servidores ¡mucho más lejos de lo necesario!

namehelp te permite obtener lo mejor de ambos mundos — utilizar un servicio de DNS público sin reducir tu rendimiento web. Ejecuta pruebas desde tu computadora para determinar tu configuración óptima de DNS y, si determina que estás recibiendo un rendimiento sub-óptimo, lo corrige automáticamente interactuando con DNS y CDNs para asegurar que el contenido sea entregado desde la copia más cercana.

Availability

namehelp is no longer distributed. It was released for Windows, macOS, and Debian- and RHEL-based Linux, with source available from October 2012.

Papers

Content Delivery and the Natural Evolution of DNS — IMC 2012
namehelp: Intelligent, Client-Side DNS Resolution — SIGCOMM 2012 poster, also in CCR

Coverage

Network World, Computerworld, ACM TechNews and McCormick News (2012); Lifehacker and ghacks.net (2012); MakeUseOf (2013); and coverage in France (Korben), Poland (Spider’s Web), Russia (Софт@Mail.Ru), Turkey (chip.com.tr), Brazil (IDG Now!, Dicas para Computador) and Vietnam (PC World VN, Mía Lùi).

People

Lead & PI

Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)

Students

With thanks to Andrés Bustamante for the logo, Mario Sánchez for the Spanish translation, and Richard Campbell and Keith Petersen for early feedback.

namehelp built on namebench, BeautifulSoup, dnspython, Flask, Jinja2, Werkzeug, graphy, httplib2, ntplib, PyASN1, pydhcplib and Python-RSA.

Client-Side DNS and Content Delivery — the project namehelp was built for

Client-Side DNS and Content Delivery

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Project Overview

Content delivery networks decide which replica should serve you based on where your DNS query appears to come from. For most of the Web’s history that was a reasonable proxy: your resolver belonged to your ISP, so it sat near you, and a CDN steering toward the resolver was steering toward you.

Public resolvers broke that assumption. When users moved to third-party DNS services for speed, reliability, or filtering, their queries began arriving at CDNs from somewhere else entirely — and the CDN, doing exactly what it was designed to do, sent them to a replica near the resolver rather than near the user. Users adopting a service to make browsing faster could end up fetching content from much further away.

This project measured that interaction at scale and then did something about it.

Measuring the Interaction

Content Delivery and the Natural Evolution of DNS measured the end-to-end cost of remote DNS on CDN performance, and gave the first evaluation of the industry’s answer to it: the EDNS client-subnet extension, which attaches a truncated client address to the query so a CDN can steer on the client rather than on the resolver.

The extension works where it is deployed. The difficulty is that it requires both the resolver and the CDN to participate, and adoption was thin — so the performance cost kept falling, unevenly and invisibly, on precisely the content CDNs work hardest to place well. That gap is what made a client-side answer worth building.

namehelp

namehelp is the response, built on what the paper calls Direct Resolution: a proxying DNS server on the user’s own machine that keeps a third-party resolver for general queries — so users keep the reliability and speed they chose it for — while resolving CDN-hosted names directly, so the query carries the client’s own network position rather than the resolver’s. It recovers most of the performance that remote resolution gives away, and it needs neither the CDN nor the resolver to agree to anything.

Running at the client is the point. It needs no cooperation from the CDN, no change at the resolver, and no support from the ISP, which is what made it deployable by an individual user rather than by agreement among providers.

Software

namehelp — a proxying DNS server that keeps the benefits of third-party DNS while avoiding the performance penalty for CDN-hosted content. Ten thousand users within a month of release.

Papers

Content Delivery and the Natural Evolution of DNS — IMC 2012
namehelp: Intelligent, Client-Side DNS Resolution — SIGCOMM 2012 (demo)
Behind the Curtain – Cellular DNS and Content Replica Selection — IMC 2014. Carries the same question into cellular networks, and also belongs to the mobile thread.

Coverage

namehelp was covered by Network World in 2012, and picked up by outlets in France, Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam, Poland, and Russia.

People

Lead & PI

Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)

Students

Ongoing Work

The questions namehelp raised — where resolution should happen, and what it costs the user when it happens somewhere else — are still open, and two efforts currently under submission continue them: Onoma, and a study of hidden DNS resolvers. Both have been presented as posters.

Decentralization, Privacy and Performance for DNS — SIGCOMM 2021
The Aleph — decoding geographic information from DNS records
AquaLab Research Group

DNS | Aqualab - Northwestern University

namehelp

Overview

The Problem

What namehelp Did

Reception

Privacy

Availability

Papers

Coverage

People

Related Links

Client-Side DNS and Content Delivery

Project Overview

Measuring the Interaction

namehelp

Software

Papers

Coverage

People

Ongoing Work

Related Links