Technofriends

Earlier last week, Google released its own public DNS resolver which is seen as a step by many to kill OpenDNS. Now, when their exists so many different options in front of the end user, it does make sense to figure out which of these available DNS resolver is the fastest. After all, a faster DNS resolver is the first step to a faster internet performance.

NameBench hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use. namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way. This project began as a 20% project at Google.

In order to get started, you must first download namebench from here. NameBench is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. NameBench utility is available with both a GUI ( Graphical user interface) as well as a command line option.

Once you have downloaded NameBench, instantiate it. You will be greeted with an interface where in you can provide your own nameserver IPs ( if you wish) and select relevant checkboxes to include public DNS servers like Google’s DNS resolver and OpenDNS.

namebench works by requesting website addresses from each DNS server. This dialog allows you to select where this list of host names are generated from. The most accurate data source is your browser history, though for smaller histories, the benchmark may bias toward your currently configured primary DNS server. This list contains each browser that namebench was able to find a history for, along with how many records it found in the history file (in parenthesis).

This list also contains “Alexa Top Global Domains (10000)”. This data source contains a list of the domains for the top 10,000 most popular websites on the Internet. While this data set is useful, it does not necessarily reflect your DNS use. For example, this list contains many domains in China that someone who lives in Finland is unlikely to query for.

Once the run completes successfully, your default web browser should pop-up with a report.

Have you used namebench for benchmarking your DNS resolver against the other known public dns resolvers? How did the results compare?

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