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DNS BenchmarkDNS Benchmark
Domain Name Speed Benchmark
Are your DNS nameservers impeding your Internet experience?
We're working on v2 of GRC's DNS Benchmark:
15 years (and 9,314,377 downloads) after our DNS Benchmark was first written and released, we are working to update the original free edition with new features and introduce “Plus” and “Pro” commercial editions.
Features Free Plus Pro
IPv4 Yes Yes Yes
Benchmark 200 nameservers Yes Yes Yes
Updated 4800+ server list New! New! New!
Updated “top50” websites New! New! New!
Updated default nameserver list IPv4 IPv4/v6 IPv4/v6
Auto configure fastest DNS New! New! New!
IPv6 Support - - - New! New!
Encrypted DoH (DNS over HTTPS) - - - New! New!
Encrypted DoT (DNS over TLS) - - - New! New!
Encrypted DNSCrypt - - - New! New!
User-provided domain testing - - - New! New!
DNSSEC (signed domains) - - - New! New!
DNS “Spoofability” testing - - - - - - New!
Can run as a Windows service - - - - - - New!
Long-term performance graphing - - - - - - New!
Automatically use fastest servers - - - - - - New!
Failing server auto-bypass - - - - - - New!
Background monitoring - - - - - - New!
Continuous logging - - - - - - New!
24-hour performance comparison - - - - - - New!
Measure non-A/AAAA records - - - - - - New!
Your support for this utility In spirit $ $ $
Price:  Free $9.95 $19.95
Buy it once to own it, and use it, and get ALL future updates – forever.
(These plans and goals are subject to change during development.)

Plus & Pro editions:

IPv6: Although the Internet's support for IPv6 (the next Internet standard) is advancing slowly, systems that support IPv6 use it. This means that benchmarking the performance of the Internet's IPv6 DNS servers has become crucial since that's what many systems will use. Plus & Pro add full support for IPv6, benchmarking those servers alongside IPv4 nameservers.

DoH, DoT, DNSCrypt: Plus & Pro can compare the speed of traditional (unencrypted) DNS against encrypted DoH, DoT and DNSCrypt name services to determine whether using encrypted private DNS will impede Internet use – and if so, by how much? They show which encrypted services respond fastest from your location.

Check specific domains you care about: Plus & Pro allow users to add additional domain names to the benchmark's traditional “Top 50” domains list. This can be useful for users who wish to verify and monitor that their DNS content filtering solutions are working – those domains are not resolved – or who may wish to find nameservers that are not blocking access to otherwise prohibited content – those domains are resolved.

DNSSEC domain signing verification: Plus & Pro will display and verify whether nameservers are providing signed “DNS Security” records for end-to-end name-spoofing protection.

Pro edition only:

Continuous background monitoring: In addition to all of the features offered by Plus, Pro offers continuous, lightweight, background monitoring and logging. The Pro edition can run as a Windows system service – always watching and unobtrusively testing – and since GRC's DNS Benchmark is written in 100% pure assembly language, it consumes almost no system resources. It can be setup, forgotten, and left running.

Built-in “Spoofability” testing: Checks the randomness of DNS server port and ID generation to gauge DNS spoofing resistance.

Entensive logging, charting & graphing: Whenever desired, extensive logs, graphs and charts of performance over time can be displayed and used for long term DNS analytics.

Automatic nameserver assignment: Since Pro runs and monitors DNS server performance in the background, it knows when a system's current nameservers are no longer running as fast as others. If desired, it can change the system's DNS servers on-the-fly and log the reasons for doing so. If a nameserver drops offline, it can replace it with the fastest alternative.

Measurement of non-address records: DNS is increasingly being used to carry much more information that just IP addresses – and their performance can be important. Pro allows these non-address DNS record types to be queried and measured.

Purchase Plus or Pro ONCE and own it forever:

Owners of the Plus or Pro editions will never be asked to pay again. No subscription nonsense or future upgrade costs. If you own either edition you own it for life and your support of this software will encourage its continuing development.

WHEN will these editions be ready?

The short version is, we have NO idea – we cannot even guess. This announcement was made when this became our current project and it's all we're currently working on.

We're providing this early notification of the future availability of these free and commercial v2 editions because 3,089 people visit this page every day, because 1,702 copies of v1 of this DNS Benchmark are downloaded every day, and because:

We thought you might want to know what's going on and be notified the moment the v2 releases of the DNS Benchmark are available:

Receive news of updates, new freeware and services:
 
(Every email sent contains an instant unsubscribe.)

If you subscribe to the GRC News mailing list, we'll let you know the moment pre-release editions are available for download, as well as when the final v2 editions are available. And since we never want anyone to receive email they don't want, every email includes an instant unsubscribe link.

Sign up and we'll let you know what's going on!

GRC's industry standard DNS Benchmark 1.x

A unique, comprehensive, accurate & free Windows (and Linux/Wine) utility to determine the exact performance of local and remote DNS nameservers . . .

“You can't optimize it until you can measure it”

Now you CAN measure it!

DNSBench
Click here or on the image above to download this 169 KByte program.

File stats for: DNSBenchfile download  freeware page
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Last Updated:
Size: 169k
Apr 21, 2019 at 00:00
(2,024.32 days ago)
Downloads/day: 1,702
Total downloads: 9,314,377
Current Rank: 1
Historical Rank: 1

Although GRC's DNS Benchmark is packed with features to satisfy the needs of the most demanding Internet gurus (and this benchmark offers features designed to enable serious DNS performance investigation), the box below demonstrates that it is also extremely easy for casual and first-time users to run:

How to Run the DNS Benchmark
After downloading and starting the utility (there's nothing to install), it's as easy as . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3

dnsb-123

1tClick the “Nameservers” tab to select the main benchmark display and data pages.
2tClick the “Run Benchmark” button (it may take a moment to become enabled).
3tClick and read the “Conclusions” tab after the benchmark completes.
Unless you're a super-guru, PLEASE really do read the “Conclusions” tab once the benchmark has completed. Some people have initially been overwhelmed and intimidated by this benchmark's deep and rich feature set, and by the amount of specific detail it generates. They haven't known what it meant or what, if anything, they should do about it. But you will discover that the “Conclusions” tab presents a distillation of all that, into a set of carefully worded . . . er . . . Conclusions.  Really.

Links to further descriptive help, FAQ pages and resources for this benchmark
utility are located at the bottom of each page. An overview and list of the
unique features of GRC's DNS Benchmark utility are provided below.

Why a DNS Benchmark?

People use alphabetic domain names (www.grc.com), but Internet data packets require numerical Internet IP addresses (4.79.142.202). So the first step required before anything can be done on the Internet is to lookup the site's or service's domain name to determine its associated Internet IP address.

www.grc.com   arrow-r   [4.79.142.202]

Since nothing can happen until IP addresses are known, the use of slow, overloaded or unreliable DNS servers will get in the way, noticeably slowing down virtually all of your use of the Internet.

Unless you have taken over manual control of the DNS servers your system is using (which, as you'll see, is not difficult to do), your system will be using the DNS servers that were automatically assigned by your Internet connection provider (your ISP). Since they are likely located close to you on the Internet (since they are provided by your own ISP) they may already be the fastest DNS servers available to you. But they might be in the wrong order (the second one being faster than the first one, and that matters) or, who knows? Many people have discovered that their own ISP's DNS servers are slower than other publicly available alternatives on the Internet, which are faster and/or more reliable.

This DNS Benchmark will give you visibility into what's going on with your system's currently assigned DNS servers by automatically comparing their performance with many well known publicly available alternatives.

What is GRC's DNS Benchmark?

GRC's DNS Benchmark performs a detailed analysis and comparison of the operational performance and reliability of any set of up to 200 DNS nameservers (sometimes also called resolvers) at once. When the Benchmark is started in its default configuration, it identifies all DNS nameservers the user's system is currently configured to use and adds them to its built-in list of publicly available “alternative” nameservers. Each DNS nameserver in the benchmark list is carefully “characterized” to determine its suitability — to you — for your use as a DNS resolver. This characterization includes testing each nameserver for its “redirection” behavior: whether it returns an error for a bad domain request, or redirects a user's web browser to a commercial marketing-oriented page. While such behavior may be acceptable to some users, others may find this objectionable.

The point made above about the suitability — to you — of candidate nameservers is a crucial one, since everything is about where you are located relative to the nameservers being tested. You might see someone talking about how fast some specific DNS nameservers are for them, but unless you share their location there's absolutely no guarantee that the same nameservers would perform as well for you. ONLY by benchmarking DNS resolvers from your own location, as this DNS Benchmark does, can you compare nameserver performance where it matters . . . right where you're computer is.

When the benchmark is run, the performance and apparent reliability of the DNS nameservers the system is currently using, plus all of the working nameservers on the Benchmark's built-in list of alternative nameservers are compared with each other.

Results are continuously displayed and updated while the benchmark is underway, with a dynamically sorted and scaled bar chart, and a tabular chart display showing the cached, uncached and “dotcom” DNS lookup performance of each nameserver. These values are determined by carefully querying each nameserver for the IP addresses of the top 50 most popular domain names on the Internet and also by querying for nonexistent domains.

Once the benchmark finishes, the results are heuristically and statistically analyzed to present a comprehensive yet simplified and understandable English-language summary of all important findings and conclusions. Based upon these results, users may choose to change the usage order of their system's own resolvers, or, if alternative public nameservers offer superior performance or features compared with the nameservers currently being used, to switch to one or more alternative nameservers.

DNS Benchmark Feature List:
The Executable Environment: Primary Benchmark Features: Additional Power-User & Convenience Features:
Where to go from here?

The best way to familiarize yourself with the DNS Benchmark's operation is to download a copy to your computer. Note that it's not very large (only 169 KB) so it won't take long. And also note that there's nothing to “install” — you just run the executable file. So fire it up and poke around at its many features.

The “Features / Operations Walkthrough” page provides a visual quick-reference guide to the program. You are invited to refer to that page while exploring the program, or check-out the Features / Operations Walkthrough page first.



GRC's DNS Benchmark Pages:

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