Which DNS provider is the fastest?

As we already know, DNS servers are essential to navigate the Internet. They play a very important role in communication and are an integral part of any Internet domain. So, by changing the DNS server, can we speed up the operation of our Internet?

Every time we want to visit a website, connect to a mail server or send a message via instant messenger, we are dealing with a DNS server. Our computer, browser or mail client needs to determine the IP address of the server to which it will connect.

Requests for IP addresses are very quick, but when you count the number of requests, you may find that you are wasting your time connecting to DNS servers. We will check the connection times to popular DNS services such as Google, OpenDNS, CloudFlare or Quad9.

Serwery DNS

We have plenty of available DNS servers, from those provided by the Internet provider to our own server running on VPS. Many companies provide their DNS servers for free and this is what we will focus on.

• Google (8.8.8.8) – the most famous DNS server, the provider does not log domain queries,
• OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 · 208.67.220.220) – has the function of blocking pornographic and data theft websites,
• CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) – another very popular provider who does not log domain queries,
• Quad9 (9.9.9.9) – the company provides blocking of suspicious websites and ensures privacy of DNS queries,
• CleanBrowsing (185.228.168.9, 185.228.168.10, 185.228.168.168) – depending on the chosen DNS server, we will have blocked pornographic sites, VPN servers or even Youtube,
• Yandex (77.88.8.1, 77.88.8.2, 77.88.8.3) – similar to CleanBrowsing.

Many of these providers, in addition to protecting your privacy, have functions such as DNSCrypt, DNS over TLS or DNS over HTTPS.

Testing of DNS response

I used dnsperftest to run the test. It checks the response times of the DNS mentioned above.

The testing took place from about 20 different locations in the world. I used for this purpose various servers running in AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean. Local server rooms and home connections were also used for testing.

Example of a test result:

                  test1   test2   test3   test4   test5   test6   test7   test8   test9   test10  Average 
192.168.0.1       5 ms    6 ms    6 ms    5 ms    4 ms    4 ms    7 ms    5 ms    6 ms    7 ms      5.50
cloudflare        9 ms    8 ms    8 ms    9 ms    7 ms    8 ms    8 ms    9 ms    9 ms    7 ms      8.20
opendns           11 ms   36 ms   10 ms   37 ms   29 ms   30 ms   10 ms   31 ms   7 ms    12 ms     21.30
level3            28 ms   29 ms   29 ms   30 ms   30 ms   30 ms   29 ms   38 ms   30 ms   31 ms     30.40
norton            33 ms   32 ms   30 ms   35 ms   31 ms   33 ms   32 ms   34 ms   27 ms   32 ms     31.90
neustar           34 ms   30 ms   38 ms   29 ms   35 ms   34 ms   32 ms   38 ms   36 ms   32 ms     33.80
google            16 ms   14 ms   14 ms   14 ms   34 ms   177 ms  12 ms   35 ms   13 ms   35 ms     36.40
adguard           39 ms   38 ms   37 ms   43 ms   37 ms   39 ms   37 ms   38 ms   38 ms   37 ms     38.30
yandex            35 ms   30 ms   51 ms   29 ms   34 ms   30 ms   32 ms   32 ms   30 ms   89 ms     39.20
comodo            43 ms   42 ms   37 ms   40 ms   39 ms   38 ms   39 ms   39 ms   39 ms   49 ms     40.50
quad9             8 ms    7 ms    8 ms    8 ms    173 ms  7 ms    8 ms    9 ms    8 ms    174 ms    41.00
freenom           36 ms   115 ms  35 ms   37 ms   96 ms   291 ms  34 ms   41 ms   37 ms   86 ms     80.80
cleanbrowsing     157 ms  156 ms  161 ms  156 ms  156 ms  161 ms  156 ms  156 ms  162 ms  157 ms    157.80

Summary

After a test lasting about a month, the fastest DNS servers were CloudFlare. The average response time for different locations was about 5.42 ms. The record low response time was for the USA, where I noted 1.87 ms.