Consultsteimel blog

Speed up the Internet with faster DNS

With Google Opendns and Ultradns all having free available DNS servers, you can pick and choose which is the fastest.  I ran this tool at work and at home and it was 35 to 40% faster.  At my home it found a different verizon DNS server, at work it found openDNS to be faster then my office's public DNS server.  I run that dns server, so i guess i should get crackin at speeding that thing up.  It was the second faster DSN server though, eh whatever.  I noticed a difference almost immediately while cruising the interwebs, Domain lookups are much faster. 


Here is the definition of DNS for everyone there
Domain Name System: A database system that translates an IP address into a domain name. For example, a
numeric IP address like 207.219.116.4 is converted into netlingo.com. ...


The program is really easy to use and has a lot of diagnostic features.  Download it, open it, and hit go.  It will display the results in your web browser.  If you use one or more custom DNS servers you can type them in before you hit go separated by a comma.  It took me from 5 to 10 minutes for it to complete the test so be patient.  It also has a bunch of graphs that show how your local DNS servers stack up against each other. 

NameBench is free and open source for linux or windows.  So go ahead and download and speed up your internets.

Name Bench via lifehacker

Ps: here is a little tutorial on how to add dns entries for windows users.