This is great if you're at home or there's no IT team like in the article (a dream come true!) but if you're in a more corporate network these kinds of tools will usually ping NSFW servers.

I also prefer namebench (https://github.com/google/namebench) since it runs at the command line.

What sort of DNS server is NSFW? I can't imagine that any DNS benchmark would need to reach out to anything other than a DNS server. If I recall correctly, the GRC DNS benchmark uses a set of domains set up expressly for the benchmark itself.

Disclaimer, I haven't looked at GRC explicitly, but often tools like this will

* check whether a range of domains are censored by the DNS

* lookup a bunch of domains and ping them to check whether the DNS server is returning properly localized addresses using EDNS - Cloudflare DNS is a good example of one that was not (at least a few months ago)

Yes, I just used dig's reported timings:

    dig triplebyte.com @1.1.1.1 | grep 'Query time'
    ;; Query time: 2 msec
    dig triplebyte.com @8.8.8.8 | grep 'Query time'
    ;; Query time: 21 msec

but could imagine doing a more thorough benchmark like the one you linked if my results weren't so dramatically different!

wow didn't think it was this much of a deal but can confirm

    dig triplebyte.com @1.1.1.1 | grep 'Query time'
    ;; Query time: 5 msec
    dig triplebyte.com @8.8.8.8 | grep 'Query time'
    ;; Query time: 35 msec