Being male I’m probably obsessed with fiddling when I could probably spend my time doing something productive. One obsession is tuning (I spent more than the value of my first car on “performance parts”) which I’ve slowly cured over the years and now refuse to modify my cars.

Funnily enough one thing that has made a real difference to my internet performance now that I have broadband is to ignore the popular opinion on websites and actually benchmark my home dns performance and then stick to it.

In my case I’m fortunate to have a decent router that has a caching dns service (rather than simple pass through) and I’ve set this to query the fastest dns server I can get to on my connection. All connections on my LAN point to the dns server on my router by getting the settings through DHCP.

Rather than blindly pointing to Google or Cloudflare, please benchmark your performance by using a DNS performance tool. As I’m very old I like to use GRC’s DNS Benchmark. Yes I’m a Windows user so I probably excluded a bunch of readers but for the rest of us it is a simple .exe and creates an INI file (remember those?) when you create a custom resolvers list.

If you are like me and don’t live in the US then run the program (this is what apps used to be called) and create a custom resolver list, then run a benchmark and adjust your network.

Read and weep – in my case Cloudflare takes ten times as long to resolve an cached dns lookup as my router and Google thirty times as long. Unfortunately the cliche is that the fastest dns is that provided by the vendor of my connection. Your mileage may vary, which is why you should test.

Now to deal with the challenge of dns settings when you have failover between two ISPs!