This is a fork of Nominum's 2.1.0.0 dnsperf tool http://nominum.com/measurement-tools/ which adds initial support for TCP. This is a work in progress!

Be aware that the current implementation of TCP works within the existing design of this software, with the limitations imposed by this. So it is not really optimal for TCP connection handling - a better solution would be a standalone tool with all the functionality of dnsperf/resperf.

NOTE Support for TLS is available in a separate branch feature\tls_openssl. To implement this some re-factor of the code was required which has a small performance impact, therefore this code has not been merged into master.

Feedback and comments are welcome either via email to [email protected] or [email protected] or via the issue tracker for this repo.

This work is supported by a donation from NLnet Foundation.

• To date only dnsperf has been updated, not resperf.

• When performance testing TCP there are many more considerations than with UDP, particularly in terms of tuning the kernel and the nameserver configuration. Also when limiting the number of queries per connection at high query rates errors may be encountered because the client machine may be attempting to re-use connections in the TIME_WAIT state.

• There are many optimisations that could be added to this implementation and a number of TCP specific features to add in future e.g.

  • TCP Fast Open
  • Option to use TCP_NODELAY

• The Statistics need to carefully interpreted when using TCP. The output called 'Latency' has been re-named to 'RTT' since this is what it actually measures for each DNS message. The 'Run time' reported for UDP is the amount of time taken to send all the queries. This is also true for TCP, but it will include the time taken for TCP handshakes and connection re-cycling.

• Note that a few TCP 'extra' connections may be opened at the end of the run even though they are not needed due to the way dnsperf works.

• TCP is selected by specifying the '-z' flag.

• This implementation was done with RFC7766 in mind so that by default dnsperf will open 1 TCP connection per client (as specified with the '-c' flag) and pipeline queries over that connection. A limit on the number of queries sent per connection can be set with the '-Z' flag.

• The '-x' flag is only honoured for TCP when the number of messages on a connection is unlimited.