if you look at the query in Wireshark from TCP SYN to the DNS response packet was ~11ms for me and dig claimed it was 3ms. kind of surprising that OP found it A

if you look at the query in Wireshark from TCP SYN to the DNS response packet was ~11ms for me and dig claimed it was 3ms. kind of surprising that OP found it ALWAYS faster. I had some queries that were faster over UDP. when you are not counting the TCP connection setup I would expect them to be close to the same.