Google and Web Performance
Well, we should accept that Google is working hard to improve user experience on web. They have proved with their search engine, soon then launch Gmail as super fast web mail that allowed more storage for users and so many other initiatives that includes spdy alternative http protocol.
Few months back they launched Public DNS Service which claimed to be Super FAST dns server publicly available.
Google DNS Servers : 8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4
During this launch Google also created a DNS benchmarking utility and made it open source for the public where more developers have improved it later. This utility is really awesome. It is super fast, can be run on command line interface, GUI (required some open source tools, libraries) It is also available for Windows and Mac.
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Why should you do DNS benchmarking?
If you are internet savvy and want to improve your web experience you will tend you use this utility to first of all bench mark your DNS server performance is set in your network settings, say in /etc/resolve.conf on Linux. or you can find your current dns server by doing a test dns lookup;
Example :
nslookup hackersgarage.com
Output:
Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: hackersgarage.com Address: 75.127.109.111
When you do online serving your web browser do dozen of DNS lookups and each dns lookup is resolved by DNS server for the first time and then cached in your browser cache for the particular time depend on TTL set for that specific domain and record. Now if you do one dns lookup, you won’t feel delay but when you do web browsing dozen of DNS lookups time consume a lot of time that slow down web browsing.
namebench is a utility that can be downloaded from googlecode repository.
you can download sourcecode, windows or for Mac from NameBench on googlecode
namebench help you scan public dns servers and recommend you the best DNS server that should be set in your network settings for surfing. If you are using web Gui of this application, it will generate html file or command line is awesome because its really fast. Give it try.