Google DNS tool to check your DNS servers name resolution speed

In an earlier article, we talked about Google's public DNS server launch and how to configure your computer to use them. However, should you be switching over to a third party DNS servers from the ones provided by your own ISPs ? Internal name resolution such as the ones for Active Directory environment, privacy concerns as well as resolution speeds are factors that you should consider. In this article we will show you step by step on how to check your DNS name resolution speeds with different DNS providers, using the free utility NameBench DNS tool from Google Labs

NameBench is a great DNS tool that does not need any installation to the hard drive, it just needs to be extracted and run. You do not need administrative privileges for doing this. All you need to know is what DNS server you want to test against, in most cases NameBench DNS tool will automatically find your default DNS server from your IP configuration. You can of course change it if you want. So lets go ahead proceed with installation and use of NameBench.

Step1: -Downloadn Namebench from http://code.google.com/p/namebench/

Step 2: - Start the install by double clicking on the exe and then click on Extract to extract the file. The file will be automatically extracted and small GUI window will pop up

Step 3: - In the NameServers section, you can specify a specific name server, for example the one provided to you by your ISP. Also note that if you are using a router, in most cases the default name server for your machine will be your router's ip address (in this case 192.168.0.1)

Step 4: - In most cases, leave most of the values as default, as most of them are self explanatory, please let us know if you need any help with these. Finally click on "Start Benchmark". Please be patient while the test runs, look at the bottom of the Namebench window for its progress. Depending upon how many tests and runs you choose, it will take a while. I did 200 tests and 1 run and it took about 20 minutes.

Step 5: -  Once the tests are complete, the results will load in your default web browser. In our case, our internal DNS servers were 50% faster than the closest DNS servers from Google in speed.

That's it, you will now have your results for various different tests to compare to. If you want to share your ideas, any other software of the similar kind that you use, your experience with a third party DNS provider or simply want to provide feedback, you can always contact us by leaving us a comment here or by using the  Contact Us form.