What is a good average upstream response time?

Routers
1

I see this stat in Adguard Home and I have no idea what it means. With ControlD as the upstream DNS, I'm seeing a response time of 47 ms. Is this good? What is considered to be good and excellent?

2

That's the latency it takes to get back the IP of the domain name you're looking up.

I typically get somewhere between 55 to 65 ms on Quad9 (on their malware filtering servers) over DOH but that's 'double NAT'd' — from behind another router before hitting the WAN — ~30 to 45/DOH on the edge, sorting algo/remote load dependent:

Wed Aug  6 09:29:08 2025 daemon.err dnscrypt-proxy[2299]: [2025-08-06 09:29:08] [NOTICE] -    35ms quad9-doh-ip4-port443-filter-alt
Wed Aug  6 09:29:08 2025 daemon.err dnscrypt-proxy[2299]: [2025-08-06 09:29:08] [NOTICE] -    36ms quad9-doh-ip4-port443-filter-alt2
Wed Aug  6 09:29:08 2025 daemon.err dnscrypt-proxy[2299]: [2025-08-06 09:29:08] [NOTICE] -    38ms quad9-doh-ip4-port443-filter-pri
Wed Aug  6 09:29:08 2025 daemon.err dnscrypt-proxy[2299]: [2025-08-06 09:29:08] [NOTICE] Server with the lowest initial latency: quad9-doh-ip4-port443-filter-alt (rtt: 35ms)

I can 'feel' ~90 to 100+ ms but your tolerance may be higher than mine. IIRC the best I've personally seen was < 30 ms (~25 ms?) using Cloudflare/DOH but I don't like Cloudflare. They hold logs for 24--48 hrs. No thanks.

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3

Cloudflare's anycast DNS has a typical response time of a couple millisecond (I get 2ms).
If you are using WiFi that will add a few milliseconds.
If you are using LTE that will add +40ms.

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4

Nice. Are those rates using DOH, DOT or clearnet? I assume it's an unfiltered upstream.

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5

I'd love to know too.

6

a brief test, I was about 15ms.

I think the response time below 100ms is acceptable, the speed difference between loading resources is very small

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