A while ago I noticed that Firebug would report 40-100ms DNS lookups for sites that could not possibly not be in the local DNS. When reloading a page that had just been rendered, the same DNS lookup delays would show up over and over. I could not verify whether it’s an issue with my ISP or the local router. Initially I thought that maybe it’s ipv6 [1], but disabling it did not make the DNS lookups faster or go away, so I went for a local DNS cache.
I couldn’t say it better my self, the complete installation instructions are here [2], the short version:
1. sudo apt-get install dnsmasq2. edit /etc/dnsmasq.conf and uncomment listen-address=127.0.0.13. edit /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf and modify the prepend line to look like this:prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; 4. edit resolve.conf:
nameserver 127.0.0.1 nameserver whatever_IP_there_was_already
5. sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
6. sudo /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart[1] IPv6 will slow you down
http://www.belshe.com/2011/05/18/ipv6-will-slow-you-down-dns/
[2] Faster browsing in Linux with local DNS cache
http://www.webupd8.org/2009/12/faster-browsing-in-linux-with-local-dns.html
George's Techblog 