If you’ve ever found your Internet connection slow there’s a good chance that slow or overloaded domain name servers (DNS) were involved. They do the translation from web addresses to numeric Internet Protocol addresses. These lookups happen every time you enter an address or click on a link.
Google has released an open source DNS benchmarking utility called namebench. It’s available free, under an Apache license, here.
I was a little skeptical when I read about it. After all, Google has just announced Google Public DNS — i.e., made its own DNS servers publicly available, ostensibly with the intention of providing the world with a faster web browsing experience.
The side-effect, Google knowing about every single web site you visit, would inevitably help Google tailor the relevance of search results to your known interests. That is, if you trust Google with this information.
Naturally, I expected that Google’s DNS would prove the fastest. Certainly my own ISP’s have been dismal at times, but for my personal use I’ve never felt like shifting to the likes of OpenDNS, whose rationale is first, filtering out sites that employees and children shouldn’t be able to access (gambling, porn etc.), and then reliability and security (blocking known malware sources e.g.).
I ran the program with the default values: 200 lookups against my (ISP’s) current DNS servers and regional and global providers. Here are the results:
Google Namebench results
Although it returned a few errors — timeouts, I assume — a DNS server I didn’t know about, belonging to BT, responded on average in a fraction of the time of my current provider. As you can see above, Namebench helpfully provided recommended settings for my router (and some graphs not included here).
Clearly, I will get back a few seconds, maybe many seconds, every day!
It’s hard to find anything to fault about this, unless of course, it’s Google softening us up to switch to Google’s DNS later. For now, though I’m happy to take Google’s declared aim at face value:
The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.
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I should try that, I guess, although it falls into the if you don’t know its broken you won’t waste time even trying to fix it category.
Precisely. The picture above actually conceals a problem — revealed with a 2nd pass for which I didn’t make a picture. Behind the 192 local IP address are 2 ISP DNS servers; the primary one was down and the 2nd was slow.
I should have named and shamed my ISP (Be). Although they offer the fastest connection here (24Mbps nominal) their DNS has been poor exasperatingly often, sometimes crapping out altogether, leading to rage on the customer forum. For some reason they just seem incapable of operating it. I’ve now dropped their DNS servers entirely and rely on external servers. I will keep an eye on it. It’s a very easy thing to check now.
One of the first comments after I posted to the forum was
“I finally got the addresses and added them, restarted my browser and OMG, pages load instantly, and I mean the whole page came up pretty much right away.
Now I dint think these results would be so noticable, afterall its just a few ms that it saves, btu its alot more than that and it much much better than BE’s DNS servers.”
Then I discovered my ISP had made changes to its DNS and not advised customers, most of whom use DHCP and so don’t need to know, unlike those using static IP/s.
http://beusergroup.co.uk/technotes/index.php/DNS_Issues
Google is definitely performing a public service!
A useful post from Lifehacker on this topic
http://lifehacker.com/5420632/how-to-know-when-your-dns-servers-are-failing