DNS check is one vital part to you daily internet life. If it fails, you are basically screwed. You would be seeing Page Not Found pretty much all day long. If it’s slow, you are pissed. You are wasting your high bandwidth to wait the very tiny portion to pass. If it’s fast, most of us probably would don’t even know if it’s existed.
Here are two tools to help you test and benchmark your DNS setup in your network settings and see if they are function normally.
Namebench is another free open source DNS testing tool that even recommend what would be better based on the number after the benchmark test. The tool requires to be installed before using it. It queries hundreds of names from the data source and shows the recommendation at the bottom of window with a much detailed info on your default browser.
As you can see, switching your DNS server from your network settings to Google Public DNS is going to speed your Internet access speed by very much. If you are on a domain-joined machine you are probably out of choice switching this setting. But if you are using PC that’s not domain joined, you should considering changing this setting to make your life better. There are a couple of ways of doing so but because most of PCs nowadays are getting IP addresses from their connected router via DHCP, whether wired or wireless. So simply changing your router’s DHCP setting to assign a faster DNS server will definitely do the trick and make all your PCs that connect to the same router much happier.
Namebench work for Windows, Linux, as well as Macs.