bitplumber.net

So a few days ago Google announced their new public DNS service that will answer recursive queries for any host.  There has been a lot of coverage of this elsewhere so I did not feel compelled to post anything about it until I saw this post discussing how fast Google’s DNS servers were compared to other ISP’s servers.  I felt that I am in a somewhat unique position to provide some test data as I have direct access to an Internet connection from an ISP peered with NWAX which has Google as a member.  The end result of this is that my round trip times to many Google services are 3-4ms.

So I downloaded the same test tool as Jon Radoff and ran the test from my connection.  In the results below you can clearly see that Google is the fastest (or right there with the fastest).

A test of DNS server performance from an Internet connection close to Google

I would conclude that Google’s DNS servers are just as fast as any other out there, but the issue is that of latency.  Your ISP’s servers have an advantage over Google (in most cases) since they sit on the service providers network.  That is not to say Comcast or Verizon may not have their DNS servers on the other side of the country from you, (but that would be just dumb).

All in all, I am very happy that Google now provides this service as it may be really useful from time to time.  Most corporate environments don’t care though since they have internal DNS servers to handle their recursive requests.

-Eric