Clear the DNS cache in Windows

In this article, we want to teach you How to Clear the DNS cache in Windows.

Before you start to learn how to clear the DNS cache, let’s see what DNS and DNS cache are.

What is DNS?

The Domain Name System (DNS) converts human-readable domain names into the Internet Protocol or IP addresses.

Computers can only communicate using a series of numbers, so DNS was developed as a sort of “phone book” that translates the domain you enter in your browser into a computer-readable IP.

What is DNS cache?

A DNS cache is local storage that contains the records of a computer’s query history, including recent website visits.

The operating system (OS) uses caching to store DNS resource records, which avoids redundancy when attempting to access a web page and therefore decreases DNS lookup latency.

If a machine has recently visited the page it wants to access, the cache can supply the IP address of its web server, completing the website request before the lookup has to query the DNS server.

Clear the DNS cache in Windows

First of all, on your windows client open the Run window with the Winkey+R.

Then, type the cmd to open the Command Prompt window.

Note: You can search Command Prompt in your start menu to access the cmd environment.

Now run the following command to clear the DNS cache:

ipconfig /flushdns

After a moment in your output you will see:

Output
Windows IP configuration successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

It means that you have successfully cleared your DNS cache, and if the sites didn’t open because of the DNS, it will solve this.

Conclusion of Clear the DNS cache

The DNS enables human users to keep track of more web pages and to access them as required, and DNS caching expedites the DNS lookup process to more quickly resolve a domain name to an IP address when the OS has visited a web page before.

At this point, you learn to Clear the DNS cache in Windows.

Hope you enjoy it.

May this article about How To Troubleshoot DNS in Linux be useful for you.