Hello,
I purchased Cloudflare teams to help get better ping for gaming on my PS5/XBOX. Can anyone help me configure my gateway so I can have the best possible connection. I have issues when using multiple gaming systems at once.
Cloudflare for Teams is not designed to improve gaming performance. Depending on your geo location it is unlikely to have any (positive) impact WRT ping times.
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I know a lot of people who changed their DNS to get better ping. They recommend changing it to Cloudflare public DNS which is:
**Primary DNS -1.1.1.1
**Secondary DNS -1.0.0.1
Stated here by Cloudflare developers as well.
I ran a benchmark test using this public DNS and I do get better ping than using my current provider which is Xfinity here out in Michigan. So I figured why not run my own private paid DNS server and try to filter both of my gaming systems to its own gateway.
I do not know if this is the best solution or if I am doing it right I am still learning how all this works lol. So any input or advice is very much appreciated.
A better ping to what? The same IP address of the game server? Do you have access to traceroute as well? It’d be interesting to see what the differences are.
This is just a guide to change the DNS servers on your consoles - it does not state network performance improvements. It might speed up the resolution of the IP address, but this will not improve your overall network performance - a.k.a. “ping” by itself.
If anything is changing (which I highly doubt), it’s the server IP you are being directed to due to a round-robin record response that is different from your provider DNS vs Cloudflare.
Can you describe the benchmark test and what tool you used? @sdayman says, traceroute will show the differences.
AFAIC there is a lot of misleading websites/videos/blogs out there claiming changing your DNS will improve your connection speed. This is simply untrue. Yes, using Cloudflare DNS will make the resolution faster in some cases and it might have an impact on the user experience when browsing, but it will not improve your ping to the same destination IP - especially since all of your systems will cache the result of the DNS lookup for a period of time.
To understand what’s going on, you first need to know what DNS really is. It’s basically an address book. Your system is given a domain hostname to resolve - lets say “server1.awesomegame.com” and is told to connect to that hostname. The first thing your system does is send a DNS resolution request (in other terms - address lookup) to your configured DNS server. That DNS server responds with something your network card can understand - an IP address. Then, your system will attempt to connect to that IP address and continue communication with just that - the IP address, and nothing more. Your system does one more cool thing - this is called caching. After the DNS request is returned, your system (and browsers) will cache the response for a period of time to save it from having to perform another lookup.
The DNS resolution, will only occur once during the entire connection session - unless for some reason the connection is dropped, and the cached DNS entry is expired - that is the only time your system will do another address lookup to reconnect.
Your traffic does not route through a DNS Server - DNS is not a gateway or a router.
Here is a Cloudflare article for reference. Link
As for why people are claiming its speeds up your connection - is probably due to the IP address that’s being returned is different from Cloudflare vs their provider.
What sort of “ping” are you getting anyways?
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