You can actually temporarily change just your system's DNS to various DNS services, then try loading a rich web page a few times, performing your own informal benchmarking of the effects of trying out the various public DNS services that are listed below, for example. cnn.com with ad blocking cnn.com with no ad blocking DNS Performance Analytics and Comparison screenshot from Apr 01 2018. Note that there are helpful summary statistics along the bottom. Now you're ready to just refresh the web page, noting that the "Disable cache" checkbox is automatically on by default for this "Developer" tool's lovely waterfall view, as pictured below. Next, select the Network tab, and click the 3 dots to choose Dock Side position (mine is on the bottom).
To test page load times yourself, open Chrome, visit cnn.com, then if you're on a PC press F12 or if you're on a Mac, click on View, Developer, Developer Tools. All those lookup milliseconds can quickly add up to several seconds total, partly because of the sequential loading that some page elements require. Without ad blocking, it's actually 424 requests! Many of those requests require a round-trip DNS requests, including various off items. Yes, today, it requires 151 requests just to finish loading, and that's with ad blocking turned on. Why is DNS speed important?ĭid you know that loading many popular web sites require hundreds of requests for various elements? This is especially the case for media-rich home pages, such as cnn.com. They tend to really just forward all DNS requests to your ISP, by default, and don't really do the local DNS lookups with DNS caching that my compact VMware vSphere home lab datacenter greatly appreciates. The speed difference isn't always as apparent though, when using consumer grade routers. You know, physics and all, that speed-of-light thing. Also note that such local DNS from a local router will be fastest, as it's a local lookup with essentially no pesky distance-based latency. Just like Steve's 10.1.0.0 router shown at the top of his screenshot. I do regret removing my own home's Ubiquiti 10.10.1.1 router from my test results screenshots in my recent Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 article, so subsequent tests will include it. As seen in the screenshot, in File Explorer, I right-clicked on the DNSBench.exe executable, chose Properties and then the Digital Signatures tab, I then highlighted the one entry and clicked on the Details button. How do I know this was released today? By the digital signature in the executable file. As featured in my recent Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 DNS article, the only somewhat more popular public DNS offerings left out in this build that can easily be added manually is Norton ConnectSafe's 199.85.126.20 and 199.85.127.20. I noticed that Cloudflare and Quad9 primary and secondary DNS IP addresses have now been baked right into the tool, so you won't have to add them manually, making things even simpler, see also my step-by-step guide below. What's new in this release? Steve Gibson signed the new DNSBench.exe version. This is why I'm not at all worried that my recent set of screensheets that I took when testing out Cloudflare's new 1.1.1.1 DNS are somehow obsolete.
What we learned during Steve's on-air mention yesterday that all he planned to change in his new release was the built-in list of IPs, that's in, no other known bugs needed fixing.
It's still works fine, right through to Windows 10 Build 1709 though. The last time Steve updated that page was likely back in 2010, when the last version of DNS Benchmark was released. In a way, you could say that this version doesn't even exist quite yet, according to the slightly outdated DNS Benchmark Version History.
The Domain Name System (or DNS) converts human readable domain names (like: into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (like: 173.194.39.78).Ĭomputers can only communicate using series of numbers, so DNS was developed as a sort of “phone book” that translates the domain you enter in your browser into a computer readable IP.Įarlier this evening, I noticed that the version the latest DNS Benchmark download has a splash screen showing as version. THE GLUE THAT HOLDS THE INTERNET TOGETHER Posted by Paul Braren on (updated on Apr 7 2018) in