dnsperf

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dnsperf and resperf are free tools developed by Nominum/Akamai (2006-2018) and DNS-OARC (since 2019) that make it simple to gather accurate latency and throughput metrics for Domain Name Service (DNS). These tools are easy-to-use and simulate typical Internet, so network operators can benchmark their naming and addressing infrastructure and plan for upgrades. The latest version of the dnsperf and resperf can be used with test files that include IPv6 queries.

dnsperf "self-paces" the DNS query load to simulate network conditions. New features in dnsperf improve the precision of latency measurements and allow for per packet per-query latency reporting is possible. dnsperf is now multithreaded, multiple dnsperf clients can be supported in multicore systems (each client requires two cores). The output of dnsperf has also been improved so it is more concise and useful. Latency data can be used to make detailed graphs, so it is simple for network operators to take advantage of the data.

resperf systematically increases the query rate and monitors the response rate to simulate caching DNS services.

See also the dnsperf(1) and resperf(1) man pages.

More information may be found here:

• https://www.dns-oarc.net/tools/dnsperf

Issues should be reported here:

• https://codeberg.org/DNS-OARC/dnsperf/issues

General support and discussion:

• Mattermost: https://chat.dns-oarc.net/community/channels/oarc-software

Usage

dnsperf and resperf read input files describing DNS queries, and send those queries to DNS servers to measure performance.

Dependencies

dnsperf requires a couple of libraries beside a normal C compiling environment with autoconf, automake, libtool and pkgconfig.

• OpenSSL - for TSIG support
• Concurrency Kit - for atomic operations
• LDNS - optional for dynamic update support
• nghttp2 - for DNS-over-HTTPS support using HTTP/2
• json-c - optional for statistics output in JSON format

To install the dependencies under Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install -y libssl-dev libldns-dev libck-dev libnghttp2-dev libjson-c-dev

To install the dependencies under CentOS (with EPEL/PowerTools enabled):

yum install -y openssl-devel ldns-devel ck-devel libnghttp2-devel json-c-devel

To install the dependencies under FreeBSD 12+ using pkg:

pkg install -y openssl ldns concurrencykit libnghttp2 json-c

To install the dependencies under OpenBSD 6+ using pkg_add:

pkg_add libldns nghttp2 json-c

Building from source tarball

The source tarball from DNS-OARC comes prepared with configure:

tar zxvf dnsperf-version.tar.gz
cd dnsperf-version
./configure [options]
make
make install

Building from Git repository

git clone https://codeberg.org/DNS-OARC/dnsperf.git
cd dnsperf
./autogen.sh
./configure [options]
make
make install

Additional Software

The contrib directory contains additional software related to dnsperf and resperf.

License

Copyright 2019-2026 OARC, Inc.
Copyright 2017-2018 Akamai Technologies
Copyright 2006-2016 Nominum, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at
 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.