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.

namebench was written using open-source tools and libraries such as Python, Tkinter, PyObjC, dnspython, jinja2 and graphy.

Screenshots

Here is what the nameserver overview looks like:

Mean Response Duration

Response Distribution Chart (First 200ms)

There is also a full timescale graph as well.

Command-line version

If you are running the command-line version, you get something that looks like this:

Fastest individual response (in milliseconds):
----------------------------------------------
Scarlet-1 BE     ################# 9.97782
SYS-193.121.171. ################## 10.56194
Completel-2 FR   ########################### 16.48903
CyberServ PSA NL ############################ 16.87098
OpenDNS          ############################# 17.55810
Google Public DN ############################## 18.16297
UltraDNS         ############################## 18.30387
Webline BE       ###################################### 22.61090
Cesidio-A DE     ########################################## 25.56205
Arcor/Vodafone-2 ##################################################### 32.37319

Mean response (in milliseconds):
--------------------------------
UltraDNS         ##################### 73.52
OpenDNS          ####################### 81.91
Google Public DN ######################### 88.39
Scarlet-1 BE     ########################## 92.90
SYS-193.121.171. ############################### 111.16
Arcor/Vodafone-2 #################################### 128.46
Completel-2 FR   ####################################### 139.62
Webline BE       ############################################## 165.15
Cesidio-A DE     ################################################## 180.79
CyberServ PSA NL ##################################################### 191.80

Response Distribution Chart URL (200ms):
----------------------------------------
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lxy&chs=720x410&chxt=x,y&chg=10,20&chxr=0,0,200|1,0,100&chd=t:0,16,17,17...

Response Distribution Chart URL (Full):
---------------------------------------
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=lxy&chs=720x410&chxt=x,y&chg=10,20&chxr=0,0,1631|1,0,100&chd=t:0,2,2,2,2...

Recommended configuration (fastest + nearest):
----------------------------------------------
nameserver 156.154.70.1    # UltraDNS  NXDOMAIN Hijacking
nameserver 194.119.228.67  # Scarlet-1 BE  
nameserver 193.121.171.135 # SYS-193.121.171.135