Benchmarking DNS resolvers on Android

Benchmarking DNS resolvers on Android

Have you ever wondered which DNS resolver is the closest to your location?

There is an Android app called DNS Speed Test that I have been using for a long time that allows to make latency tests on the go.

As you can see here in Seoul Cloudflare is by far the fastest, since I hit the Seoul PoP.

For some reason Google makes me go through North America according to traceroute/mtr, hence the difference. I checked on gcping.com and it's the same for the closest location, Tokyo, which has a huge 50 ms latency...

However, the latency doesn't matter that much for mobile devices. I've been using the DNS-over-TLS resolvers from AdGuard, which as you can see are more than 200 ms from me, and it's perfectly fine. These latency tests are still interesting though!

Stanislas
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Stanislas
I like building things with code and computers

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  1. Bernie Innocenti

    This is an interesting writeup, but I tried the DNS Speed Test and unfortunately it's crap: it seems to do a single ping, and the results change wildly every time I repeat the test.

    Besides, the latency to the virtual IP doesn't matter at all, because that's only where the TLS connection is terminated, not where the DNS server really is. To see the real latency, you must use dig (and check both a cached name and one that forces the nameserver to perform a recursive lookup).

    1. StanislasAuthor

      Thanks for your comment. If it does a ping it's indeed crap, although it remains a somewhat good indicator.