How to Benchmark Google Public DNS – NameBench
We love Google; Google loves our information even more. Recently, Google has gone one step closer into our digital life. Google introduced their latest service, public Domain Name System (DNS). Web surfers might come across DNS this word, but don’t actually know what it means. Here a simple explanation of DNS from Google and why is it matter.
The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.
Times when I troubleshoot the network and need to manual edit the DNS, I found myself having problem remember DNS server IP, common one such as Starhub ISP or OpenDNS. But Google has brilliantly chosen the easiest IP could be remembered – 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
If you don’t know how to change your DNS, you can check out this instruction – here. You can choose to either set it on your OS or inside the setting of your router.
Benchmarking Google Public DNS
After setting up your DNS, the next thing you would like to go, or at least for geeks like us, we would like to test the speed, see how far can this DNS resolver can go.
First step is install namebench, Interesting to find out this piece of software comes from 20% project in Google. The benchmark Data Source, you can make selection from the history of your browser or Alexa top 10,000 domain. Namebench dig up my 70k domains from my Chrome!
I left the rest of the parameters as default and start the test. I discovered that the software will crash eventually when I choose to get the Data Source from Alexa.
Result
I tested in my office, the ISP is Starhub. But turn out SingNet DNS is fastest?!
Seem like my office has firewall or proxy networking stuff, that the response time was much slower than at home.
One thing good about the NameBench is that it can get the best DNS in your region and include into comparison. When I second time running the benchmark and ISP is Starhub, the fastest DNS result turned out to be AsiaSoftSea. Who is this? I guess it is a local regional public DNS.
In conclusion, Google Public DNS haven’t managed to score over local DNS. However, it has already beaten the OpenDNS I have been using.
Internal 192-0-1 was 8.8.8.8 since my router was directly assigned to Google DNS.
If any of you have anything you’d like to add, please contribute by commenting below. Thanks!
