Diffent timings between pfSense and namebench

[nagel]

I am trying to understand why pfSense is reporting different then namebench on DNS resolution timing.

pfSense is rating DNS resolver first and very quick where namebench is displaying slow performance. How can I check how quick DNS is resolving. Any suggestions?

10.0.0.5 = pfSense DNS resolver

[Raffi_]

That's not an apples to apples comparison. pfSense DNS resolver (Unbound) will be the fastest option for queries to sites that are already cached. That's why yahoo.com came up as 0ms for 127.0.0.1. It was already cached by Unbound. Namebench is sorting servers by non-cached performance. With that said, in my recent experience I think there might be a bug in the pfSense GUI because I was getting non-cached sites also coming up with 0 ms timing.

Try GRC DNS benchmark. https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm.
It sort servers by cached performance by default, so it will likely tell you pfSense is the best. I think the reason being in real world use cases, cached performance is probably more important than non-cached. The sites you visit most frequently will take no time to find. Whereas, if it takes 50 ms or even 100 ms (1/10th of a second) more time the first time you go to a random site, who cares? After that it'll be cached anyway. Unless you never go to that site again and it becomes a stale record and removed from cache. But again that would be a don't care because you never went to that site again :)

[nagel]

Great tool and pfSense is the best ;)