DNS Benchmark. And the winner is....

When was the last time you thought about how fast your DNS queries were occurring? I will be the first to tell you that it hadn't crossed my mind in a while, but after Google recently announced a public DNS service I was curious to see how it stacked up against my current provider, Comcast. I must admit I almost changed my DNS settings blindly and was glad I didn't after running a few benchmarks.

Now a few of you may be asking why do I care and Google provides a great answer "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." Google's pitch to try their service is based on the expectations that you will get a speed improvement, better security, and absolutely no redirection. I will leave the security claim to others and agree they have no redirection. My main focus was, can it make my browsing experience faster?

Now everyone's results will vary so before you decide to start changing your DNS servers make sure you see who offers the best performance and offers the services, availability, etcetera that you expect. Below are my results for comparison and to see what to expect.

My local providers (Comcast) DNS services outperformed the closest competitor (OpenDNS) by 29%. As you can see from the results Google wasn't even in the top 5! I had anticipated a better showing from a performance perspective from the Google offerings. Even without the performance impact you may wish to use a DNS server outside of your ISP for other reasons, such as URL blocking. Now this is a very narrow test, using only 15,052 URLs to lookup and was limited to a small window of time. I would be curious to see this test executed over a longer period of time and see if the results stick.

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.
	Why should you try Google Public DNS? By using Google Public DNS you can: Speed up your browsing experience. Improve your security. Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

Comments

[JL]

Awesome to see Comcast DNS tested out faster that Google Public DNS and others for you. We work hard to ensure our DNS is fast and secure for customers.

JL
Comcast - Engineering