Performance evaluation of DNS servers to build a benchmarking system of DNS64 implementations

Abstract

DNS64 is an important IPv6 transition technology that facilitates the communication of an IPv6 only client with an IPv4 only server, which becomes a more and more common scenario. Several different DNS64 implementations exist, and their performance is a relevant decision factor for network operators. RFC 8219 has defined a benchmarking methodology for DNS64 servers, which requires the operation of an authoritative DNS server at 220% of the query rate used for DNS64 benchmarking. In this paper, we aim to build an authoritative DNS server that operates at 2.2 million qps (queries per second) rate, thus it facilitates DNS64 benchmarking up to 1,000,000 qps rate. To that end, we compare the performance of BIND, YADIFA, NSD, Knot DNS and FakeDNS (a special purpose software) to find the best suiting one of them. We fully disclose the details of our measurements including the configuration of the DNS implementations, the usage of our improved software tester called dns64perf ++, and the details of the hardware and software measurement environment in the NICT StarBED, Japan. We perform a series of measurements to examine, how the performance of the tested solutions scale up with the number of the active CPU cores from 1 to 32. Besides their performance, we also measure their memory consumption and zone load time. We present and discuss all the results. In addition to successfully building an authoritative DNS server with the required performance, we also make recommendations, which solutions suit to different special needs.