Acrylic DNS Proxy

Acrylic DNS Proxy aims to enhance your browsing experience and reduce the time needed to load a webpage through response caching.

In other words, the responses that are returned from DNS servers are cached by Acrylic DNS Proxy, which has an impact on the time allocated to name resolution when a webpage is accessed.  While this amount of time is not large (name resolution usually takes up to a second for each page), the results are visible in time.

Acrylic DNS Proxy is easily deployed and runs as a Windows service. Upon installation, the Google Public DNS server are used.

Modifying its default configuration is done by editing the designated text file, but note that the service must be restarted for the changes to take effect. The configuration file includes options for setting the DNS servers that will resolve a particular host or query type, choosing the UDP port the primary DNS server is listening to, and so on. Each option si accompanied by explanations and examples that can help you get a better overview of the application's capabilities.

Another advantage of Acrylic DNS Proxy is its ability to block unwanted ads before they are downloaded. This is achieved by using a custom HOSTS file that is similar to the default one in Windows, but it can handle a very large number of domain names, also providing support for regular expressions and wildcards. To make Acrylic DNS Proxy load hostnames faster, you should sort them in ascending order in the HOSTS file.

The package also deploys a command line utility that enables you to get a glimpse of how DNS caching is implemented. Acrylic DNS Proxy first loads the configuration file and then proceeds to caching responses for each DNS server. Hostnames, regex expressions, patterns and exceptions are loaded, and the host resolver is initiated.