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namebench 1.3.1

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(4) 2.25

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The NameBench Project

namebench is a DNS service benchmarking tool. Speed up your internet experience by finding the best DNS servers available! namebench can utilize your web browser history, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation.

What's New

Version 1.3.1:

Do not count failed censorship checks against a hosts overall reliability rating.
Set censorship check timeout to a hardcoded 30 seconds.
Update Google Public DNS node id detection.
Updated DNS server data.
Other bugfixes.

Requirements
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

DNS Performanc...

+1
Free

Charts DNS server performance.

namebench User Discussion (Write a Review)

ver. 1.x:

(4)

Your rating: Now say why...

Overall:

(5)

sort: smiles | time

-2

Buck Wheat reviewed on 17 Dec 2011

The app does not run period. It immediately unexpectedly quits the moment I open the program. I am running OS X (10.7.2) on a iMac 12,2 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM, a 251 GB APPLE SSD TS256C and a 2 TB HD and a AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics card with 2 GB of VRAM. If you need any additional info or need me to test something please respond.

[Version 1.3.1]

-1

-15

Whosyourtator reviewed on 04 Aug 2011

This would be a great concept except for one thing. Seriously, you should remove the censorship check feature. Doing DNS queries for these web sites is a good way to get your door busted in during the middle of the night. At least include a warning or something so that people know what they will be connecting to. I was appalled at the list of sites that showed up on the results html page. Seriously?

[Version 1.3.1]

+334

MacUpdate Lon commented on 12 Aug 2010

I use this app every day. It just works. Dead simple to use. Nice stuff.

[Version 1.3.1]

+544

Negritude commented on 03 Jun 2010

Namebench is now at version 1.3. It fixes a critical bug that prevented the use of Alexa data under OS X.

[Version 1.2]

+450

sjk commented on 26 Feb 2010

MU doesn't mention that v1.2 is currently beta (1.2-BETA1).

[Version 1.2]

1 Reply

Thomas Stromberg replied on 01 Mar 2010

The listing has now been updated so that it links to the real 1.2 release.

Gabereal commented on 08 Jan 2010

It uses EITHER your IE history or, better yet because I always delete mine, Alexa's 10000 list of top global domains from around the world. THEN you may select the data as weighted (statistically), randomized, or chunked. It will also advise of dns hijacks and the like avoiding them automatically in it's final report which is optimized for your region.
Nothing whatsoever to do with a google datamine nonsense review previously posted. I switched to treehoo anywho.

[Version 1.1]

1 Reply

+138

Thyx replied on 23 May 2011

And by IE you mean you've got OS 9 on your iBook? Me too :-)

Amaloney commented on 05 Jan 2010

Using namebench 1.1 on a Macbook Pro running OS X 10.6.2 and an Apple Airport.

After I start namebench there is an inordinately long time searching.
During that time I lose DNS capability in that I get msgs that the page cannot be found.

When I quit namebench, this loss continues.

To restore my ability to use the internet, I must shut down the Airport and restart it.

[Version 1.1]

+42

StevenJayCohen reviewed on 15 Dec 2009

Kudos to the developer!

I had changed over to Google Public DNS until I used this app and found out that both OpenDNS and Verizon's DNS were actually faster from my location.

After a bit of fiddling with my settings, namebench confirmed that I had optimized my conection.

Very useful tool (could use better progress indicators though).

[Version 1.0.5]

+296

Thus.spake.z tipped on 09 Dec 2009

I'd say that this thing is treacherous. If you value your privacy, i.e, want to keep your browsing history away from prying eyes, then don't use 'namebench'.
I ran namebench and on the resulting readout I viewed the query details and it listed literally hundreds of the websites that I've been to and, of course, it's got one's IP address, too.
So some entity has all this info about one's browsing habits. Which entity? Oh, that scum sucking information vampire Google, without doubt. And there have got to be other such information vampires out there as well. On the developer's website it states
"This project began as a 20% project at Google". So, Google is still associated with this project, no?
And, I'd imagine, namebench's developer has access to the info gotten from namebench's users. What, then, does the developer do with the info?
Apparently, one's browsing history and their website IPs are retained somewhere, most likely at the internet server that one is using.
On namebench's UI, under 'Benchmark Data Source' one chooses from a couple of one's browsers or something called 'Alexa Top Global Domains'. The benchmark data is then collected from one of these sources.
Anyway, think twice, or even thrice, before using 'namebench'.

[Version 1.0.3]

1 Reply

+10

Thomas Stromberg (developer) replied on 10 Dec 2009

While the theory is interesting, I believe the source code speaks for itself -- feel free to read it sometime. All namebench does is repeat by default the same DNS queries you have made to your existing nameserver to the other nameservers you have selected to compare against. If you are not comfortable with this, select the Alexa Top 1000 domains as a data source. The recommendation won't be as individualized, but still somewhat useful.

+73

Mitch_de commented on 08 Dec 2009

TO DEV:
I can see the WIn version is now 1.0.2, does an OS X version also come next days ?
Thanks!

[Version 1.0]

+98

TSMelo had trouble on 16 Nov 2009

Crashes every time I try it... Since there's (almost) no configuration, I don't believe I'm doing anything wrong.
Any thoughts?

[Version 0.9.3]

2 Replies

Thomas Stromberg (developer) replied on 16 Nov 2009

Wow, thanks for the heads up on the crashing. Right now there is not a logfile being written to, but you can see all of the logs by opening up Applications -> Utilities -> Console. If it is still causing you problems, can you open a bug at http://code.google.com/p/namebench/issues/list with the log messages? I will take care of it ASAP. Thanks!

-3

Simty replied on 04 Dec 2009

crashes for me too