Merlin,
"Benchmark tools that check for response times like DNSBench are worthless, and will usually hurt your general performance rather than improve it. Never rely on these."
What is the best way to determine a DNS to use then?
Merlin's answer leads to another observation I've made when I was testing pfSense.
The default DNS cache size of dnsmasq (1000/1500) is woefully inadequate. pfSense allows you to use Unbound as the DNS server software and it allows a maximum of 100k entries. Just opening a single page caused many thousands of entries to fill the cache. Now imagine a network connection that you share with family and the rate at which the cache will fill and overwrite itself will be astounding.
Increasing the cache size of dnsmasq to its maximum of 10k helps the cache entries stay alive a little bit longer.
killall -SIGUSR1 dnsmasq
tail /tmp/syslog.log -n 10
Apr 11 02:42:56 dnsmasq[4804]: cache size 1500, 0/116 cache insertions re-used unexpired cache entries.
Apr 11 22:51:11 dnsmasq[797]: cache size 1500, 0/9308 cache insertions re-used unexpired cache entries.
Apr 11 22:51:11 dnsmasq[797]: queries forwarded 2034, queries answered locally 2698
Apr 12 13:19:18 dnsmasq[503]: cache size 8192, 0/106312 cache insertions re-used unexpired cache entries.
Apr 12 13:19:18 dnsmasq[503]: queries forwarded 25920, queries answered locally 37873
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