I sometimes get lag spikes causing ping times of 200 ms; might using different (e.g. Google's) DNS servers be better?

I live in the UK and I am a heavy gamer and I get lag spikes that take my ping to 200ms. Will using a third-party DNS Service, for example the one provided by Google, rather than those provided by my internet service provide help with this problem? Download speeds are irrelevant to me.

Solution 1:

The location of DNS servers is irrelevant to network speed.

The DNS server informs your system about the IP address of the site you're looking for.

After that, the DNS is out of the way, the name - IP address correspondence is cached for a period of time and you are connected directly to the IP.

If your ping is taking more than 200 ms, the problem lies on your LAN, the connection to the ISP or the connections from the ISP to the rest of the world.

You can run some tests from your PC to identify where is the bottleneck:

1. From your PC, ping your router under normal conditions and again under lag spikes. If response times increase, then the problem is in your LAN, and that makes your PC a suspect also.

2. However, if you get the same times on step 1, then ping a well known site (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) on normal conditions and on lag spikes. If response time increases, the ISP is the problem. Your connection could be having problems or you need to upgrade to more bandwidth, or least probably the ISP is having problems in its connection to other ISPs.

3. And finally, if response times don't change in step 2, then it's very likely that your ISP is throttling bandwidth to specific types of traffic (BitTorrent, online games, etc.).