How To Find Out Which DNS Is Fastest For You [Windows, Linux, Mac OS X]

Google released it's public DNS and I saw some debates on different blog on wrather it is possible or not for the Google domain name servers to be faster than your ISP DNSs.

I know of two applications (thanks to GoogleSystem and Dsq) which you can use to see which domain name servers (DNS) are the fastest for you!

1. Domain Name Speed Benchmark

Domain Name Speed Benchmark is a free utility to determine the exact performance of local and remote DNS nameservers which works on Windows and Linux, under Wine.

To use it, download it, add Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) and your ISP DNS (it already comes with OpenDNS and lots of other different domain name servers) and click on "Run Benchmark"

Download Domain Name Speed Benchmark

2. Namebench

Namebench is a project which began as a 20% project at Google and it hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use (for free). 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 available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The Windows and Mac OS X versions come with a GUI so all you have to do is download it (link at the end of the post), install it and add Google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).

To use Namebench on Linux, download the .tar.gz file, extract it, open a terminal and navigate to the folder where you have extracted namebench (example: cd /home/andrei/Desktop/namebanch) and then run the following command:

./namebench.py 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

This will add Google DNS to the existing domain name servers in Namebench. The output will contain many details regarding all the DNS, such as:

Fastest individual response (in milliseconds):
----------------------------------------------
Xnet RO          ### 2.61497
kpnqwest RO      #### 2.89702
Zapp RO          #### 3.63088
Planet RO        ######## 6.56700
Westel HU        ############### 13.28516
EOL-2 HU         ################ 14.26911
Google Public DN ################################### 31.73208
OpenDNS          ##################################################### 49.07799
UltraDNS         ##################################################### 49.43705
OpenDNS-2        ##################################################### 49.44301

Mean response (in milliseconds):
--------------------------------
Google Public DN ############################# 104.89
OpenDNS          ############################## 106.24
Xnet RO          ################################ 114.89
UltraDNS         ################################## 123.26
Zapp RO          ###################################### 136.91
OpenDNS-2        ####################################### 140.00
kpnqwest RO      ############################################## 163.75
EOL-2 HU         ################################################# 175.20
Planet RO        ################################################# 176.89
Westel HU        ##################################################### 192.48

And at the bottom you will find a list of suggested DNS:

Recommended configuration (fastest + nearest):
----------------------------------------------
nameserver 8.8.4.4         # Google Public DNS-2  Replica of Google Public DNS [8.8.8.8]
nameserver 193.230.161.3   # Xnet RO
nameserver 193.226.128.1   # kpnqwest RO 

Which you can copy into your /etc/resolv.conf file if you want to start using these DNS right away.

For more info, consult the readme file.

Download Namebench