It would be nice to see whats going on during the “DNS Lookup” portion of the request.
I use multiple authoritative DNS servers ( my own server and ISP provided server as secondary) . DNS debugging info would give us a clearer picture which is faster or slower from the test locations…
I guess this would be only possible if webpagetest uses their own recursive DNS…
yeah, sorry but in just about all of the locations WebPagetest just uses the upstream ISP’s resolver which ends up working better for any DNS-based GSLB configurations because the ISP resolvers are generally well-known and you’re more likely to get directed to the closer servers (and get more accurate results). I have seen scenarios running my own resolvers where someone thought my IP was on the other coast and was handing me to CDN servers on the other side of the country.
That said, it might be possible to do custom DNS testing from the locations if someone wrote a suitable windows app (or code). I’ve been meaning to support running things like tcptraceroute as well to help with diagnostics.
I’ve played with dnspython in the past… i can explore it to see if it can be made to query from the authoritative nameservers…