So I have been testing Google DNS server with the new tool that they just released. It might be early days, but it ain’t as fast as the alternatives for me.

Namebench

Google released a new software tool today called namebench for Mac, Linux and Windows. This nifty little tool performs a number of lookups against a number of DNS servers and gives you a measure of the different servers that you could us. It’s a simple and basic tool:

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Its all about performance

Google is having a push on performance at the moment. And rightly so. Many of the biggest websites are very slow to load, either because of bloat by Adobe Flash and various adverts or because they haven’t spent a lot of time on performance and optimization.

For this website, my monitoring tells me that I am averaging between 700-800 milliseconds for the load of my home page. Lets say that is is less than a second. But to load some of the American news sites can take ten or twenty.

Google is also getting behind HTML 5 for the same reason. It’s faster and uses less network. And the network is still the slowest part of the Internet.

My results

Herewith are my results for my home Internet connection. As you can see, OpenDNS is the big winner here. Probably because they have IP Anycast with DNS servers located in London (at a guess because the traceroute isn’t very clear where the final hop is).

Anyway, click on the pictuer for large image.

Caption Text.(Click for a full size image)