Standard DNS benchmarking tools often produce misleading results by mixing cached and uncached lookups, which masks the true reliability of upstream providers. To solve this, we have engineered dns-ultra-a high-precision Bash utility that accurately models the traffic patterns of a professional caching DNS stack (AdGuard Home + Unbound).

dns-ultra performs a structured, multi-dimensional analysis: evaluating steady-state 'fast-path' latency, simulating worst-case authoritative recursion, and testing burst concurrency to detect silent rate-limiting. Unlike generic tools, it applies a jitter-dominant scoring model, heavily penalizing packet loss and erratic routing behavior. The result is a precise, actionable ranking and a ready-to-paste configuration block for dnscrypt-proxy. This utility is now powering our internal infrastructure qualification and is available to the community to help harden privacy-focused networks worldwide.