DNS Benchmark Conclusions & Recommendations
What the results you have just obtained mean to YOU
The results summary, conclusions, and recommendations from your most recent run of this DNS benchmark are provided below. Please carefully consider the implications of making any changes to your system's current configuration before doing so.
þ System has multiple redundant nameservers configured.
This system is currently configured to use 2 separate nameservers for DNS name resolution. This is in keeping with recommended best practice (of having at least two different nameservers) so that the temporary failure of any single nameserver will not prevent all DNS name resolution.
þ All system nameservers are alive & replying to queries.
All of this system's 2 nameservers are working and replying to queries. This is terrific because if the system's primary nameserver were to become overloaded or unavailable, even briefly, one or more backup nameservers are standing by ready to supply DNS lookup services.
þ System's nameservers are probably optimally ordered.
Windows uses DNS servers in the order they are listed under the network adapter's properties, or when obtained automatically from an ISP, in the order provided by the ISP. Windows will fall back to using the second, third, and other nameservers only when the first listed nameserver fails to respond. So if the first nameserver happened to be very slow, but working, everything would be slowed down. Consequently, the order of nameserver listing should match their order of decreasing performance . . . which is probably how this system is currently configured:
Usage Order Nameserver IP Speed Rank
----------- --------------- ----------
1 169. 1. 1. 1 2
2 169. 1. 1. 2 1
Why only "probably" ?
Only "probably" because there wasn't enough of a statistically significant difference between their timings to be able to make any claims with at least 95% confidence. Here are the details:
When this benchmark is allowed to finish, it will have collected approximately one hundred and fifty (150) DNS performance samples from each nameserver being tested. Although this is sufficient to generate a good average performance estimate, if the collection of sampled values are too widely spread apart (in other words, not a lot of agreement among samples), it is impossible to know with "statistical certainty" (to be 95% sure) how individual nameservers compare to each other.
Therefore, even if the ranking shown above appears to be out of order, the differences are not statistically significant, and you should not be concerned. If you were to re-run the benchmark you might get a different outcome. This benchmark conclusion page will inform you when a problem exists that is statistically significant, and will then advise you that your DNS nameserver settings should be changed. But that is not the case with the benchmark results that were just obtained.
-System nameservers are SLOWER than 1 public alternative!
This benchmark found 1 publicly available DNS nameserver that is reliably faster than the slowest nameserver currently being used by this system. If you were to adjust your system's configuration to use this nameserver instead of what it is currently using, your DNS lookup performance, and all use of the Internet, would be improved.
Recommended Actions:
With at least 95% certainty: Based upon a statistical analysis of the spread in timing value samples received during the benchmark, there is at least a 95% certainty that the performance conclusions stated above are correct. But even so, since changing DNS nameservers requires thought and effort, it's something you want to be sure about. Therefore, since these results represent a single snapshot in time, you may wish to confirm that the faster alternative nameservers are consistently faster than your system's currently configured nameservers, and that those public alternatives don't have any negative characteristics such as being colored orange to signify that they redirect mistaken URLs to an advertising-laden search page rather than returning an error (which will be a concern to some users).
You may also wish to check the relative performance at different times of day to make sure that the performance improvement over your system's current nameservers is reliable throughout the day.
And you may wish to make sure that the alternative nameservers are enough faster than what you are currently using for the improvement to be worth changing away from what you're currently using. (This test is only saying that it's 95% sure they are any amount faster.)
þ This system's nameservers are 100% reliable.
DNS reliability is extremely important, since lookup requests that are dropped and ignored by nameservers cause significant delays in Internet access while the querying system waits for a reply. The system is then finally forced to reissue the query to the same or to backup nameservers. While your system is patiently waiting for a reply, you are impatiently waiting to get on with your Internet access.
During this benchmark test, all of the system's nameservers tested returned a reply for every request sent. It doesn't get any better than that. Very nice.
