I bumped into a neat utility called "namebench" that checks for the fastest most performant DNS servers accessible from your connection to the Internet.

This could be especially useful for those who are using (3G/HSPA) mobile broadband where DNS issues seem to be a veritable plague. Vodafone users especially seem to suffer. Very many times the simple advice to use OpenDNS resolves issues so severe that the consumer is about to junk their mobile broadband dongle and go elsewhere.

Generally, in these circumstances, connections do not happen, or take too long, or are simply problematic throughout the use of the mobile broadband. While OpenDNS may solve the problem it is not exclusively the best solution. Especially as some mobile operators seem to be blocking access to the OpenDNS servers (3 seems to be one of these).

Namebench will check out thousands of DNS servers to identify the fastest and nearest to give the best performance. It can be run from any Windows, OS X or Linux host. Once set in action leave it to do its stuff - this usually takes around ten minutes for all the tests to complete

Get namebench from here --> http://code.google.com/p/namebench/


Are you a power-user with 5 minutes to spare? Do you want a faster internet experience?

Try out namebench. It hunts down the fastest DNS servers available for your computer to use. namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation. namebench is completely free and does not modify your system in any way. This project began as a 20% project at Google.

namebench runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX, and is available with a graphical user interface as well as a command-line interface.