Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe: Analyzing and Comparing the Selection of DNS Lookup Tools

The performance of Domain Name System (DNS) resolvers is crucial, as most of the communication on the Internet starts with a DNS lookup to resolve a domain of an IP address to reach the desired content. In this sense, academia has been devoted to measuring and analyzing the performance of DNS resolvers using different tools, either tailored for each work or generic. However, such tools might present different results due to their implementation and affect the measurements. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature on DNS performance research to gather the tools and DNS resolvers most used and, based on this, provides an analysis and comparison of the different DNS lookup tools employed in the literature and discusses the impact of tool selection on measurement results. Research showed that tool selection has an impact on results but not on the lookup success rate.