DNS Benchmarking

The namebench is a GUI tool that tells you how DNS performed based on your own browser history. Based on the fact that I often visit the websites that I have already visited before, I really like such idea.

I ran namedbench several times, it always tells me that google public dns (8.8.8.8) is about 150% faster then Hinet DNS, which is my ISP DNS. Because the ping latency to 8.8.8.8 is actually 2ms longer, that makes me wonder about if this benchmark is really accurate.

So I wrote of this dns-benchmark perl program myself, which visits my Safari browsing history records in the same time order, and record the total time required on different DNS name servers, namely 8.8.8.8, 168.95.1.1 (Hinet-1), and 168.95.192.1 (Hinet-2).

My result verifies namebench's result, that 8.8.8.8 is indeed very fast: (The numbers are times in seconds)

8.8.8.8: 38.4908065795898
168.95.1.1: 165.176225423813
168.95.192.1: 1172.84540605545

There might be some unknown network issues when running 168.95.192.1, for it is 1000% longer. I will just ignore that result for now.

The total number of history entires is 1021. Many of their hostnames are duplicated, I do not remove those duplicated entries because I want to make this benchmarking acts more like what is happening in the real life. As you can see the in the result, google public dns beats Hinet dns - much more then just 150%.