Over A Cup Of Cofee

How Fast Is Your ISP's DNS Server; Compare with Speed of OpenDNS

OpenDNS speeds up your web surfing because their DNS servers have a large cache and hence can resolve web domains into IP addresses much faster than your local ISP.


But how do you confirm if the DNS Server speed of your local ISP is slower than that of OpenDNS (or vice-versa) ? Simple - use some DOS commands.

Step 1: Open Command Prompt (Start -> Run, Type cmd and press Enter).

Step 2: Type prompt $t - That changes the DOS prompt to the current time, we will need this to calculate the time it takes to execute any DOS command.

Step 3: Now run the following command where 208.67.222.222 is the standard IP address of OpenDNS server.

nslookup www.google.com 208.67.222.222

You can find the time OpenDNS takes to resolved the address by calculating the difference between the two timestamps.

Step 4: Run the same command again but replacing it with the IP Address of your local ISP's DNS server - in my case, it is 125.22.47.125 (Airtel).

nslookup www.google.com 125.22.47.125

As you can see, the DNS server of the local ISP (Airtel) was slightly faster than OpenDNS in resolving the IP address of www.google.com - something good to know but the difference is insignificant and there are plenty of good reasons to continue using OpenDNS.

Update: You can execute all these commands in a batch file for more accurate results.

ver | time
nslookup www.google.com 208.67.222.222
ver | time
nslookup www.google.com 125.22.47.125
ver | time

This is based on a comment from Resolver - "I found that my ISP's DNS server is much faster than OpenDNS… because at the moment there are only OpenDNS Server for Europe in London. I'll wait until OpenDNS Server are in Germany."