With Roon Core being a local resource, I don’t see how DNS could impact performance. Even Tidal I am assuming is integrated into Roon via an API so there is need for a DNS lookup. Am I missing something?
Ok so not April’s fools but if everyone jumps on this the servers will be hit rather hard so I hope they can cope. Dns has worked pretty well for me without this single point in the past as well as for most of the internet.
If indeed it’s a better mousetrap then only time will tell.
It’s not done anything to improve my community Ipad experience with topic loading tho.
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Thanks for sharing
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Hmm I wonder how your setup will fare if DNS suddenly became unavailable. 
Don’t expect miracles. Your response times for DNS queries will only improve by a few, perhaps 10s of, milliseconds. CloudFlare has a massive distributed network. It’s a fine platform for hosting DNS but keep in the back of your mind, it’s free. Nothing is truly free. They are likely using the raw data or metrics from queries to sell to someone to generate revenue.
Even though Core is a local resource, it’s network connected and is likely heavily dependent on name resolution for nearly everything it does. It’s easy to find out, remove the DNS entries from your Core host OS and find out.
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What Cloudflare is doing by providing this free service is getting consumers/end users on their network. By doing this their corporate/enterprise customer’s sites (who pay) gain performance increases and can be accessed faster by consumers since both ends are on the same network. This is Cloudflare’s motivation.
In terms of Roon’s reliance on DNS, my guess is that it is minimal. Remotes can talk to core and play local files without an internet connection, and any IP communications happening in the background are almost definitely nailed up to hard coded IPs and not http urls. Even if they are querying URLs, how often does that lookup need to happen and does it even translate into anything a user would perceive? Doubt it.
I’m getting average of 8ms ping time with 8.8.8.8
I’m getting average of 2ms ping time with 1.1.1.1.
This is actually good.
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I’d like to understand this better. Do you advocate any particular DNS strategy? Up until last week, I blithely set it to my router’s default and never thought about it.
I don’t think it matters much from an end user perspective. The difference between a few ms is imperceptible to a typical end user. From my perspective, I would rather have DNS that is rock solid and wont fail, which is why having a primary and secondary is best practice. Ideally, two different providers so if there is an outage or DNS level DDoS attack you are still up. Without DNS, your not surfing unless you know the IP of the origin server.
However, in the world of providing services to the ecommerce space which is what CloudFlare does, milliseconds matter. Ease and speed of transacting are chosen every day over secure transacting. It is sort of a warped world where everyone is in a never-ending race to be the fastest, easiest way to transact with the least amount of friction to the end user. When is the last time you saw 2 factor authentication on a major ecommerce/etail platform? The answer is NEVER. Many eccomerce sites are still only requiring 6 digit passwords, because the perception is long complex passwords are a pain in the ass and if your site is a pain in the ass to use the consumer will go somewhere else.
CloudFlare has a significant focus on content delivery/acceleration, and is living in a world where they have to compete against Akamai, Verizon, Fastly, etc- one of the primary measures is latency. They cache a lot of these sites static content on their network edges, so if CloudFlare can deliver a consumer based product (which none of their competitors are really in a position to do) and gain wide adoption than when they are competing on performance, they can tout a global base of users who will be able to access company ABCs website faster through them than anyone else.
They may have some secondary motivations, but this in essence is what they are trying to accomplish. If they can partner with Netgear or someone like this, and other ISPs than their base becomes significant quickly.
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Don’t put much weight in ping response times. It’s a low priority for most routers, and many don’t respond to ICMP at all (by configuration).
You really must use a DNS test program like grc.com to measure DNS server request/response time, both cached and uncached.
That said, Cloudflare appears to have implemented DNS well.
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I myself have never seen faster performance with another DNS service than my local ISP who provides my internet connection. I think it has something to do with my proximity to them versus other third-party DNS providers but recognize it also probably depends a lot on how good your ISP’s default one is.
Dyn seems like an odd omission on that report.
Rob, thanks for the detailed explanation. Never bothered to wonder or worry about the internet other than whether it was up and running. 
I appreciate your taking the time. I assume Google has similar aspirations for its free service. Any reason other than speed to prefer 1’s rather than 8’s (Google)?
It’s unknown if cloudfare collects the data and sells it. It’s guaranteed Google collects it for their own advertising purposes.
And none of that should have been a surprise since the selling of user data is way up in the strategic directios they are pursuing
Agreed that Google’s motivation is definitely data collection for advertising purposes. DNS is a valuable tool for them for sure.
They’ve spray painted advertising grafitti all over the sidewalks of San Francisco. No thanks. (Some bright-spark marketing company tries this every few years, and get slapped with a C&D and a fine. I wish they’d learn.) I’m using Quad9 which is the same idea. 1.1.1.1 has the unfortunate history of being used as an example address for many years, and so there’s lots of invalid and duplicate uses of that particular address, and it may unpredictably break things.
If you really want to be cooking with gas, set yourself up a pi-hole build and point it to 1.1.1.1 or 9.9.9.9 or your favorite DNS service.
An interesting explanation here…and a mention for pihole too 
but for me it messes up my ISP’s VPN to things like hulu and amazon prime etc from outside the USA 