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Comment by VMG | Hacker News Reader

Well the first attribute can at least be measured independently.

Numbers from South America:

    Freenom: ~260msec
    Google: ~70msec
    Local ISP: ~6msec

I hope they are more anonymous than they are fast...

Numbers from South-East US:

  Freenom: ~9ms
  Google: ~9ms (actually 0.5 ms quicker)
  Local ISP: ~33ms

From Texas:

Freenom: 140ms

Google: 2ms

Level3: 1ms

From France (free) :

    Freenom: ~60ms
    Google: ~3ms
    Local ISP: ~1ms

Try with a domain that doesn't exist. The response time topped 10 seconds for me on the first one I tried.

For a handful that do exist it seems like they're almost exactly 10 times slower than Google. ~20ms (Google) vs ~200.

It still baffles me why would someone use Google DNS over local ISPs and 8.8.8.8 being advertised anywhere make me cringe.

Because while I have a great and fast internet connection, my ISP's DNS is notoriously slow with constant outages.

My ISP's DNS inserts advertising into query results. Google's doesn't.

Sorry to hear that then. I'm positive this doesn't happen in the EU though, yet we're willingly giving Google more data.

It does happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038500

Happens in Germany with Deutsche Telekom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_hijacking

As far as I know Time Warner Cable/Spectrum still does this?

Many people don't have meaningful choices of ISPs, and some ISPs only run a couple resolver clusters far away from customers, are just plain bad at running them, or are playing DNS MITM games.

Try namebench https://github.com/google/namebench , it will give you the fastest name servers for your case (location plus usage)

Because local ISPs are terrible at running DNS. They're slow, usually vulnerable, poorly scaled, and not very redundant. I've seen a lot of ISPs in the US have "outages" that are merely "our DNS servers are down, so everyone thinks the internet is down".

Google's cache is more likely to already be populated with the answer than any ISP other than the huge ones.

ISPs in some countries are forced by the government to block certain websites, which they typically implement with domain name blocking.

From the Netherlands:

Pings:

    Freenom: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 17.509/20.928/26.588/3.520 ms
    Google: rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 18.013/21.057/24.841/2.500 ms

Actual resolve times: (dig @8.8.8.8 example.com):

    Freenom: ;; Query time: 19 msec (avg)
    Google: ;; Query time: 31 (21) msec (avg)

Averages over 10 pings / digs. The google query time had two outliers at ~49 ms. If I discount those, it's about 21 ms. But I don't see why I'd discount them.

From Germany:

    Freenom: ~34ms
    Google: ~8ms
    Local ISP: ~11ms

From anywhere:

  Local cache on 127.0.0.1: ~0msec
  Local nameserver on 127.0.0.1: ~0msec
  /etc/hosts: ~0msec

Europe/Serbia:

     Freenom: 74ms
     Google: 72ms
     Telecom Serbia: 168ms

It's funny my ISP's DNS servers are so much slower.

Pretty sure it's not maintained anymore, but "namebench" is a good tool for selecting the best DNS servers for your current location.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/downloads

from seattle:

google: 15.377/20.966/40.077/9.587 ms

freenom: 192.673/222.957/287.720/41.386 ms

Latency from my London flat:

8.8.8.8 ~4ms 80.80.80.80 ~95ms

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