Then, the “Health Check Performance” box has two options: In case you always surf online in incognito mode, and you don’t want namebench to have access to your browsing history, you can select “Top 2,000 Websites (Alexa)”: In this example, we’ll go with Google Chrome. “Query Data Source” stands for the browser you are using. This option allows the tool to anonymously send data back to the developers for potential improvements.įor the next section, you can leave “(automatic)” as the default setting for location, as it will determine your location based on your IP address. If you want to give back to the developers of namebench, you can leave the second option, “Upload and share your anonymized results,” checked. For example, it’s possible to block specific URLs if you select “Include censorship checks.” This option allows you to filter DNS servers and rank them by how powerful a DNS is at blocking unwanted websites. The section below, “Options,” includes secondary options. It’s recommended to leave both boxes checked, because that will allow the tool to search for the best available options in your area. The next two options, “Include global DNS providers” and “Include best available regional DNS services,” are primary search functions for namebench. This is an automatically-filled field, so don’t worry that you see text in the example. The first bar will show the IP address of your current DNS – for example, 216.3.128.12. Note: the configuration options for namebench are exactly the same for Windows. Now, once you’ve completed the download and installed the latest version of namebench, it’s time to configure the settings.įor Mac users, you will see the following window. In the first two parts of this article, we learned about DNS and how it works ( click here to read) and then we downloaded a program called Namebench that can help improve your Internet speed.

Download namebench 1.3.1