Speed up your internet DNS lookup time with NameBench

Google's all about speeding up the web these days, and a recent 20% project has led to a very useful Domain Name Server benchmarking tool called NameBench.

DNS servers are directories that your computer uses to look up the IP address of a site when you type in or click on a link for a domain name. The time it takes your DNS server to return the IP address your computer should access appreciably affects your perception of the browsing speed of your internet connection. Speeding up DNS lookups is one of the simplest, and most effective ways to speed up browsing.

NameBench will analyze the sites that you visit using your browser's cache, and test resolving their addresses using your currently configured DNS servers, as well as some common freely available ones online, and will recommend an ideal configuration once it has completed analyzing your unique situation.

In my case just swapping the two DNS servers I had configured led to a 67% improvement, because one of them is faster than the other. Your mileage may vary, but it's NameBench is certainly a useful tool to find out if there's a faster way to configure your DNS. NameBench is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

Tags: dns server, dns servers, DnsServer, DnsServers, domain name server, DomainNameServer, internet connection, InternetConnection, ip, opensource