Do you like to browse the Internet as fast as possible? If you didn’t already know, the DNS servers you use have a lot to do with how fast web sites load. Most people use the default DNS servers of their ISP, but this may not always be the best option.
NameBench is a free program that will take your web browser history, tcpdump output, and standarized datasets to perform a complete benchmark of DNS servers near you and around the world.
The program does not modify your DNS settings in any way, it simply gives you a detailed overview of your DNS server as compared to others. What’s neat is that it will tell you how much faster the fastest DNS server is compared to your current DNS server.
Just run the EXE file once you download it and click Start Benchmark for the tests to begin. It will take some time for the program to run since it is benchmarking a lot of servers at once.
Also, you can change the Benchmark Data Source if you like, but the program will pick the web browser that has the largest web history. You can also configure the number of tests and the number of runs, but the default it pretty good.
Once it has completed, you will get the following nameserver overview report like below. The first part tells you the fastest DNS server and how much faster it is than yours:
So apparently, I could significantly speed up my Internet browsing if I switched over to Time Warner as my DNS servers! So what IP addresses to use? Well, it tells you exactly what to type in for your Primary and Secondary DNS servers:
Then it gives you a list of the DNS servers that were tested and other information such as the Avg, Min, and Max response times.
If you scroll down, you get some more neat graphs such as a distribution chart and the mean response duration, etc. The one marked “Internal” is your current DNS server.
What’s also neat is that you can see how your DNS servers are performing against OpenDNS, UltraDNS, and Google Public DNS.
Overall, if you are a little tech-savvy, you should download and run this program to make sure your Internet is as fast as possible! Enjoy!
I had just switched to Google's DNS service.
Turns out my ISP is 51% faster! Made the changes on Local Area Network and router. Yeah I notice the difference.
Thanks
Google Public DNS service is not necessarily the fastest DNS servers out there. I also switched to Google Public DNS when it came out, but relaized using this program that they are not nearly as fast as Verizon FIOS!
My isp's dns was bad and tried opendns and somewhere found out that they record all your search queries as the search first went to opendns and then to the real Google. Maybe I will find a better one. :D