DNS Benchmarking

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The nice man at grc.com (http://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm) has written an easy to use DNS benchmark tool. I thought it might be fun to run it against Virgin's caching DNS servers and compare the results to Google and OpenDNS. Here are my statistically unreliable, unrepresentative of the network as a whole results.

Note, they indicate that Virgin's caching platform is SIGNIFICANTLY faster (for cached names, between 100 and 150%) and no less reliable than the alternatives. A lot of the query latency will be down to how long it takes your 1s and 0s to get from you to wherever you want them to go and back of course which will affect queries cached on whoever you are querying's caching name server.

On the other hand, for example, OpenDNS and Google are really seriously slow for .com lookups for no apparent reason looking at these results - a result I can only assume is down to network latency (by an extra 0.1 of a second apparently, which is quite a lot really if you consider that cached lookups actually come back in about 2/100ths to 3/100ths of a second from them on average)

Anyway, thought I'd chuck this out there. Pretty graph attached at the bottom.


194.168. 4.100 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
+ Cached Name | 0.008 | 0.011 | 0.015 | 0.001 | 100.0 |
+ Uncached Name | 0.012 | 0.085 | 0.338 | 0.089 | 100.0 |
+ DotCom Lookup | 0.016 | 0.024 | 0.039 | 0.007 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
cache1.service.virginmedia.net
Cable Online Ltd


194.168. 8.100 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
+ Cached Name | 0.009 | 0.012 | 0.016 | 0.001 | 100.0 |
+ Uncached Name | 0.013 | 0.086 | 0.345 | 0.089 | 100.0 |
+ DotCom Lookup | 0.019 | 0.024 | 0.033 | 0.002 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
cache2.service.virginmedia.net
Luton Cable Online Ltd


208. 67.220.220 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.019 | 0.022 | 0.027 | 0.001 | 100.0 |
- Uncached Name | 0.022 | 0.159 | 1.127 | 0.225 | 100.0 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.023 | 0.132 | 0.353 | 0.088 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
resolver2.opendns.com
OpenDNS, LLC


208. 67.222.222 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.020 | 0.024 | 0.046 | 0.004 | 100.0 |
- Uncached Name | 0.022 | 0.164 | 1.152 | 0.197 | 100.0 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.025 | 0.120 | 0.313 | 0.073 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
resolver1.opendns.com
OpenDNS, LLC


8. 8. 4. 4 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.023 | 0.026 | 0.036 | 0.003 | 100.0 |
- Uncached Name | 0.044 | 0.164 | 0.383 | 0.095 | 100.0 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.046 | 0.133 | 0.229 | 0.052 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
google-public-dns-b.google.com
Level 3 Communications


8. 8. 8. 8 | Min | Avg | Max |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
- Cached Name | 0.024 | 0.027 | 0.047 | 0.003 | 100.0 |
- Uncached Name | 0.038 | 0.160 | 0.364 | 0.100 | 100.0 |
- DotCom Lookup | 0.046 | 0.140 | 0.297 | 0.063 | 100.0 |
----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
google-public-dns-a.google.com
Level 3 Communications