Find the Fastest DNS Server for your Computer with Namebench

What if your ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) DNS Server is slower than alternatives like Google Public DNS or OpenDNS. Well its easy to know, grab Namebench and in less than 10 minutes you’ll find-out which free public DNS service is the best option for your computer. Namebench is a free benchmarking tool that searches for the fastest DNS servers for your computer by pitting your current DNS servers against free alternatives.

Namebench is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix. Linux (Ubuntu) users need to download and extract the tarball into the home folder, cd into the the extracted namebench folder and run it with ./namebench.py. You can permanently install it with sudo python setup.py install

At the end of the test, Namebench generates handy charts in .csv and html in your /tmp folder which display the results of the test (see screenshots above). In my case Namebench claims Google Public DNS-2 [8.8.4.4] is 37% is faster than my current primary DNS server, which is also my ISP’s DNS Server, so it just time to switch. Thanks @vasiauvi

Namebench is a 20% project at Google Code.