Maybe everyone knows this, but it took me a while to realize that almost all of my performance issues with Google Apps were related to my DNS configuration. Once I switched all my machines and routers to Google Public DNS all of my performance problems went away.
It’s remarkable. Simply hard code DNS to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Problem solved.
My office, condo, and house in Keystone are all on Comcast. For the last month I’ve been struggling in each of them. There are days that Gmail feels almost unusable – five to ten second waits between messages. Web performance was “good enough” so I assumed it was a Gmail problem.
Nope – it was a Comcast DNS problem.
In hindsight, this is kind of obvious. But wow, what a difference it made.