You also have the option to include censorship checks. But namebench may also pick up other regional nameservers that aren’t meant to be public (for example, another ISP’s DNS server). Your ISP’s DNS server will likely fall into this category, and in some cases, it may be the fastest. Include best available regional DNS Services.Īs for the regional DNS services, there are pros and cons to this option. It’s a good idea to include the global DNS providers because these are the alternatives that we so often recommend for speed, security, and reliability. Include Global DNS providers (Google Public DNS, OpenDNS, UltraDNS, etc.) It’ll guess your router’s IP address in the first textbox (192.168.1.1 or 10.0.1.1), and in most cases, you won’t have to make any changes. When you fire up namebench, practically everything you need will already be filled in. Go here for the nambench download page for all three versions. The Mac OS X version needs to be installed, though, and the Unix version requires Python 2.4 – 2.7.

Installation is a breeze: For Windows, namebench is a portable executable, which means all you have to do is download it and run it. It has a graphical user interface for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix. But what namebench can do is definitively tell you which name server is fastest for you and by how much. Our previous writeups told you that OpenDNS and Google Public DNS might be faster for you. But as we’ve explained previously, there are often faster alternatives, such as OpenDNS and Google Public DNS. By default, you’ll use a DNS server set up by your ISP. This process is handled by a Domain Name Service (DNS) server. Domain resolution, in a nutshell, is the process of converting web addresses like or into IP addresses, like 74.125.131.106 or 67.222.139.238. Namebench compares your existing DNS servers to a large list of other DNS servers, and shows you how they all perform.Several factors impact your web browsing speeds, and domain name resolution is the first link in that chain. To figure out if the DNS servers are part of the problem, check out namebench, a DNS server benchmarking app. Does anyone know any good diagnostic tools for Mac? Something inline with Apple Hardware Test. Does anyone know any good diagnostic tools for Mac? Something inline with Apple Hardware Test, Apple Service Diagnostics, tech tool pro, preferably more in depth perhaps something low level, pre-OS.

Google dns benchmark utility