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New to NextDNS...very slow performance. How to troubleshoot?

Hi all. Love the idea of NextDNS. I immediately signed up for the paid plan after experimenting.

However, I soon after realized that while the features seem incredible, web pages are loading much more slowly using NextDNS versus things like CloudFare or even Google DNS. I've now tried from two different locations with the same result.

How should I begin troubleshooting this? I've already run the diagnostics tool.

Thanks!

22 replies

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    • JB_Wells
    • 3 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hello all...any help on this? I'd really, really like to leverage NextDNS, but the slowness is real.

    Can anyone assist?

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells please send a diag report https://nextdns.io/diag

    • JB_Wells
    • 3 yrs ago
    • Reported - view
      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells seems like you are spending 100ms on about 10 hops in your (or ISP's?) internal network. Is that expected?

    • JB_Wells
    • 3 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    So very sorry...that's a red herring. I forgot I was connected to a VPN when I ran the diagnostic. However, I disconnected and have verified many times that the sluggishness continues. Here's an updated trace:

    https://nextdns.io/diag/891907c0-61a1-11eb-9d2c-6946df59a1a4

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells latency to our service looks pretty good. Do you have example of services that are slower with our solution? 

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Olivier Poitrey Oddly, pulling up *any* web page seems much slower. I switch back to Cloudfare (1.1.1.1) and things speed right up. I'll try some packet captures this weekend to see if I can track it down. Thx for your help and I'll update this thread asap.

    • JB_Wells
    • 3 yrs ago
    • Reported - view

    Hi there...I struggled a bit to troubleshoot this....it's very odd. The performance problems exhibit across both Firefox and Chrome...Safari somehow doesn't suffer as badly but it's still slower.

    Check the following gifs...in particular, pay attention to the total time to load the page. And that's just from switching the DNS server from 45.90.28.101 to 1.1.1.1. Surely just DNS misses shouldn't cause this....

    I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this.

     

    Thanks!

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells Olivier Poitrey  Note, I'm not doing  anything fancy here...just changing the IP address of the DNS server under Network Preferences -> Advanced -> DNS on macOS.

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells And I should mention...I've tested it across different machines. Same behavior.

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells can you please export the HAR file for both cases?

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Olivier Poitrey Not from the exact sessions from the gif recording, but it's reproducible...see attached for ones I just generated. Thanks for your help!

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells fastly (CNN CDN) seem to steer you to a NYC node with us and Newark with cloudflare. To confirm that, can you please mtr those two IPs:

      199.232.37.67 (steered for nextdns)

      151.101.129.67 (steered for cloudflare)

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells looking you diag again, there is something strange with our primary anycast at your place. Would you be able to try to install the profile on your mac (https://apple.nextdns.io) instead of UDP and see if you get different results?

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Olivier Poitrey 

                                                                                                                                                                                  Packets               Pings
       Host                                                                                                                                                                     Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
       1. 172.16.1.1                                                                                                                                                             0.0%   118    1.5   1.6   1.1  19.2   1.7
       2. 216-237-236-254-static.northstate.net                                                                                                                                  0.0%   118    3.0   3.5   2.5  20.1   2.0
       3. 97-75-159-21-static.northstate.net                                                                                                                                     0.0%   118    3.1   3.4   2.5  22.4   2.0
       4. 97-75-159-200-static.northstate.net                                                                                                                                    0.0%   118    2.6   3.2   2.5   7.8   0.6
       5. ae56.edge4.atlanta2.level3.net                                                                                                                                         0.0%   118   21.4  13.6   9.7  40.0   5.9
       6. ae-1-3501.ear1.newyork6.level3.net                                                                                                                                    98.3%   118   24.3  25.4  24.3  26.5   1.6
       7. 4.30.176.218                                                                                                                                                           0.0%   118   21.3  21.7  20.7  28.1   1.4
       8. 199.232.37.67
      
       Host                                                                                                                                                                     Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
       1. 172.16.1.1                                                                                                                                                             0.0%    16    1.7   1.7   1.2   5.4   1.0
       2. 216-237-236-254-static.northstate.net                                                                                                                                  0.0%    16    2.5   3.2   2.5   4.7   0.7
       3. 97-75-159-21-static.northstate.net                                                                                                                                     0.0%    16    2.7   3.5   2.7   5.7   0.9
       4. dsl-174.d01.tnwabg.infoave.net                                                                                                                                         0.0%    16   15.8   5.8   4.1  15.8   2.9
       5. 165.166.24.22                                                                                                                                                          0.0%    16   10.2  12.0   9.2  37.6   7.1
       6. 167.82.128.34                                                                                                                                                          0.0%    16   12.3  10.1   9.2  12.3   1.0
       7. 151.101.129.67                                                                                                                                                         0.0%    15    9.6   9.6   9.2  11.4   0.5
      
      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

       Olivier Poitrey If all that is required to use the profile is to install it, then I've done so (see pic attached). However, it had no effect unfortunately...still very slow.

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells what do you get for https://test.nextdns.io

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Olivier Poitrey With the profile installed, I get:

      {
      "status": "ok",
      "protocol": "UDP",
      "configuration": "fp4e56a330758bc7af",
      "client": "x.x.x.x",
      "destIP": "45.90.28.101",
      "anycast": true,
      "server": "vultr-atl-1",
      "clientName": "unknown"
      }
      
      
      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells What's even stranger? It doesn't seem to be consistent across devices like I thought. I have a 15" and a 16" macbook...while the 16" was originally exhibiting this behavior, it's not now....and that's really really strange. I'm at more of a loss than I have been in a long time.

      At this point, I may try to wipe the 15" and restore from backup and see if that magically fixes it. That said, I had applying medicine without a full diagnosis, and in this case, this just seems really strange...

      Thanks for the help and I'll keep you posted. If you think of anything else to check, please let me know.

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells do you use a VPN on one of the devices?

      • olivier
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      JB Wells JB Wells doesn’t look like you are using the profile. Protocol should be DOH and not UDP.

      • JB_Wells
      • 3 yrs ago
      • Reported - view

      Olivier Poitrey I did have vpns configured, but verified they weren't in use. 

      I resorted to reinstalling macOS, because I don't like unexplainable things. The symptoms have gone away. They've also gone away on the second machine, so it makes me question whether those where truly problems or unfortunate coincidences.

      The weird thing is that I *did* have the same symptoms on the second machine before I wiped it as well, so it would seem something in my personal software stack was in play. I am extremely safe with my machine and ran scans with malware bytes, but I did have things like virtualbox  and little snitch installed.

      All in all, very weird.

      Thanks for the help.

      John

Content aside

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