dnstrace

Table of Contents

• DNStrace
  • Installation
  • Build
  • Usage
  • Warning
  • Examples

DNStrace

forked https://github.com/redsift/dnstrace

Command-line DNS benchmark tool built to stress test and measure the performance of DNS servers with commodity hardware. This tool typically consumes ~30kB per concurrent connection and can maintain ~30,000 QPS per modern core if your server, OS and network allows you to reach suitable levels of concurrency.

This tool supports wide variety of options to customize DNS benchmark and benchmark output. For example you can:

• benchmark DNS servers with IPv4 and IPv6 addresses (for example GoogleDNS 8.8.8.8 and 2001:4860:4860::8888)
• benchmark DNS servers with all kinds of query types (A, AAAA, CNAME, HTTPS, ...)
• benchmark DNS servers with a lot of parallel queries and connections (--number, --concurrency options)
• benchmark DNS servers using DNS queries over UDP or TCP
• benchmark DNS servers with DoT
• benchmark DNS servers using DoH
• benchmark DNS servers with uneven random load from provided high volume resources (see /data resources and --probability option)
• plot benchmark results via CLI histogram or plot the benchmark results as boxplot, histogram, line graphs and export them via all kind of image formats (png, svg, pdf)

Installation

go get github.com/tantalor93/dnstrace@v1.8.0

will install the binary in your $GOPATH/bin

or download compiled binaries

linux

wget https://github.com/Tantalor93/dnstrace/releases/download/v1.8.0/dnstrace-linux-amd64

darwin(macos)

wget https://github.com/Tantalor93/dnstrace/releases/download/v1.8.0/dnstrace-darwin

windows

wget https://github.com/Tantalor93/dnstrace/releases/download/v1.8.0/dnstrace-windows-amd64

Build

make build

binaries will be in bin/ folder

Usage

$ dnstrace --help
usage: dnstrace [<flags>] <queries>...

A high QPS DNS benchmark.

Flags:
      --help                   Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
  -s, --server="127.0.0.1"     DNS server IP:port to test. IPv6 is also supported, for example '[fddd:dddd::]:53'. Also DoH servers are supported such as `https://1.1.1.1/dns-query`, when such server is provided, the benchmark automatically switches to
                               the use of DoH. Note that path on which DoH server handles requests (like `/dns-query`) has to be provided as well.
  -t, --type=A ...             Query type. Repeatable flag. If multiple query types are specified then each query will be duplicated for each type.
  -n, --number=1               How many times the provided queries are repeated. Note that the total number of queries issued = types*number*concurrency*len(queries).
  -c, --concurrency=1          Number of concurrent queries to issue.
  -l, --rate-limit=0           Apply a global questions / second rate limit.
      --query-per-conn=0       Queries on a connection before creating a new one. 0: unlimited
  -e, --expect=EXPECT ...      Expect a specific response.
  -r, --recurse                Allow DNS recursion.
      --probability=1          Each hostname from file will be used with provided probability. Value 1 and above means that each hostname from file will be used by each concurrent benchmark goroutine. Useful for randomizing queries across benchmark
                               goroutines.
      --edns0=0                Enable EDNS0 with specified size.
      --ednsopt=""             code[:value], Specify EDNS option with code point code and optionally payload of value as a hexadecimal string. code must be arbitrary numeric value.
      --tcp                    Use TCP fot DNS requests.
      --dot                    Use DoT for DNS requests.
      --write=1s               DNS write timeout.
      --read=4s                DNS read timeout.
      --codes                  Enable counting DNS return codes.
      --min=400µs              Minimum value for timing histogram.
      --max=4s                 Maximum value for histogram.
      --precision=[1-5]        Significant figure for histogram precision.
      --distribution           Display distribution histogram of timings to stdout.
      --csv=/path/to/file.csv  Export distribution to CSV.
      --io-errors              Log I/O errors to stderr.
      --silent                 Disable stdout.
      --color                  ANSI Color output.
      --plot=/path/to/folder   Plot benchmark results and export them to directory.
      --plotf=png              Format of graphs. Supported formats png, svg, pdf.
      --doh-method=post        HTTP method to use for DoH requests
      --doh-protocol=1.1       HTTP protocol to use for DoH requests
      --version                Show application version.

Args:
  <queries>  Queries to issue. Can be file referenced using @<file-path>, for example @data/2-domains

Warning

While dnstrace is helpful for testing round trip latency via public networks, the code was primarily created to provide an apachebench style tool for testing your own infrastructure.

It is thus very easy to create significant DNS load with non default settings. Do not do this to public DNS services. You will most likely flag your IP.

Examples

For examples of usage, see examples