Thanks for the info, Gothi[c]. I didn't know of those public servers (I mean 4.2.2.1-6) until now. I think the only public DNS servers I knew about were the well publicized OpenDNS.
I've heard good things and not so good things about OpenDNS but in the end I decided they weren't providing such a noticeable advantage compared with my ISP DNS servers to justify the change.
Anyway, I've now set up 4.2.2.1 as my secondary DNS server in case my ISP DNS server isn't reachable (which doesn't happen very often, but still)
On a related note, while googling this subject I came across a little (as in 36,864 bytes-little
) and very useful app called
DNS Tester. Yup, no prizes for guessing it's a DNS tester. Surprisingly, it was the only tool I could find that allows you to test the response time of different DNS servers. It's free and open source, though it doesn't seem to be updated anymore.
By using DNS Tester, you can tell for sure whether OpenDNS, your ISP's DNS servers or 4.2.2.1 is faster. In my case, it was my ISP's, so I'm sticking with those. By the way, both OpenDNS and 4.2.2.2 seem to be about the same in speed.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in that program (or at least on my system it does) that prevents it from testing more than 1 url at a time (it's prepared to test many).