Being an uber geek means many things. Late-night code-a-thons just-because, intense debates about zombies vs. pirates vs ninjas (zombies ftw!) or Greedo shooting first, and a desire to have everything running as fast and efficiently as possible.

If you agree with that last sentiment, and you follow everything Google does then you’re probably wondering if Google’s new plans to eventually dominate the entire internet free domain name server lookup service is going to offer you any performance benefits. Well I was wondering the same thing and here is how I determined that it was a good idea to switch.

1. Download the DNS Performance Test application, extract the zip archive to a folder on your system and run the executable
2. The app will start and randomize it’s list of URLs. After this is done just click start and switch to the Stats tab
3. I let the app run for ~500 results to get a good sample of data. After you’re satisfied with the number of results click the stop button and note the “Average Query Time”
4. Follow Googles directions for switching your DNS over and then repeat steps 1-3 above

After I did those steps I had an average of 213ms for my ISPs DNS and 190ms for Googles. So in my case Google is definitely faster; a 12% increase in DNS lookup performance. So it looks like I’ll be switching over. As for you, well, your mileage may vary.

Did you switch to google? Stay with your current provider? Or maybe you went with OpenDNS? Let me know how it worked out for you in the comments.

google · networking