DNS Cache Viewer : View and Flush DNS Entries in Windows DNS Cache

When you open a website in a web browser, the browser connects to the system configured DNS server to translate the domain name of that website to an IP address, and then finally the browser can connect to that IP address. In order to make everything fast, the operating system retains a bunch of DNS entries fetched earlier in a space called DNS cache so that the next time some application needs them, they can be supplied in less than a second from the cache.

DNS Cache Viewer is a small application that can show you all the existing current entries inside your computer’s DNS cache. You can see the record name (domain name), record type (A, AAA, CNAME etc), time to live (for how long the entry is valid), data length, message format, and the record itself (IP address). Unfortunately it does not offer any way to export this data to a file for later use.

DNS Cache Viewer

By default, it keeps refreshing the entries displayed from the cache every five seconds so that you get to see the latest entries all the time. But you can change this refresh rate interval to a larger value if you do not want the list to be refreshed so fast. You can also disable the auto-refresh feature altogether and use the manual Refresh Button to refresh then entries list whenever you want.

DNS Cache Viewer can also be used to flush all the contents of the DNS cache in Windows. This feature is useful when DNS cache has become corrupt and needs to be cleaned. It is also useful when you have switched to a new DNS server in network settings and want to flush out the older entries without waiting for the system to slowly do it for you.

You can download DNS Cache Viewer from https://www.michaelburns.net/Software/DCV/.