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up vote 6 down vote favorite

How can I clear my DNS cache on my android phone? (Droid3, Gingerbread, rooted to be specific)

Ideally I'm looking for a command to run through a terminal emulator, something similar to 

ipconfig /flushdns

On a windows machine.

What's the Linux version of this?

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Do you need to do this for a system app, third party app or your app? – onik♦ Sep 1 '11 at 4:02
Third party I guess? I need it for when I ping a server via Terminal Emulator. – Steve Robbins Sep 1 '11 at 4:30

4 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

On a typical Linux system the cache is cleared by running /etc/init.d/nscd restart, but at least my ROM doesn't use nscd to cache DNS. You can check if yours does, but I doubt it. I've seen suggestions that clearing the brower cache would clear DNS cache too, but one sure way is to do a hard reboot (shutdown, remove battery for 30s, reattach battery and boot).

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All of my googling also brings up the "hard reboot" suggestion. – Chahk Sep 1 '11 at 14:03
up vote 5 down vote

Addresses are cached for 600 seconds (10 minutes) by default. Failed lookups are cached for 10 seconds. From everything I've seen, there's nothing built in to flush the cache. This is apparently a reported bug in Android because of the way it stores DNS cache. Clearing the browser cache doesn't touch the DNS, the "hard reset" clears it because it simply times out.

Can we ask the underlying reason for needing to clear the DNS cache? Perhaps there's another solution that's missed because we're not looking at the bigger picture.

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Not sure about the OP, but I have a use case where my home network serves addresses like server.home.mydomain.com, but my ISP resolves *.mydomain.com (for any value of "*" this is not already mapped) to www.mydomain.com if my phone is on 3G/4G, so I'm sometimes unable to access my home network until the cache times out. – TomG Aug 25 '12 at 1:25
up vote 4 down vote

The only way to do this in Android is to do a hard reboot. The necessary command-line tools are not normally available, however in my tests a hard reboot has always done the trick for me (Galaxy Nexus, and HTC Desire, various ROMs).

This is a pain, but it is quicker than the 10min cache timeout.

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How does one perform this? – Steve Robbins Nov 29 '11 at 5:20
- Hold down the power button - Choose "Power off" - Allow phone to fully shut down - Remove battery and wait 30s - Return battery - Power phone back on. In my experience removing the battery is not necessary, but some have reported it doesn't work if you miss this step. – Martin Nov 29 '11 at 8:27
up vote 0 down vote

There're also apps like Internet Booster promising to "clear DNS cache" (amongst other things). I didn't try it out myself, and furthermore there seems no way to do only that (just one "optimize" button which "applies improvements"); also its effects might differ between devices (says the app's description) -- but it might be better than a reboot. Btw: while not mentioning root as requirement, it might still be needed.

There are several "similar apps" listed on Google Play -- but be aware that most of them include Airpush ads and/or want excessive permissions, which is why I didn't name them here.

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protected by Matthew Read♦ Nov 29 '11 at 18:44

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