I've used dnsperf in the past.  Liked the company's reputation, the design of 
the tool, and the ease of getting visual output.  I haven't used the others, so 
none of this is to say these things aren't also true about them...just what I 
liked about dnsperf.

The queryfile format makes a lot of sense, and is great for testing real-world 
performance...  It's easy to use the one they provide or build your own from 
tcpdump/query logs.  I usually do several runs with both cold and warm caches 
and take averages to find interesting edge cases.  That said, you are 
ultimately "testing the Internet" with this approach...and as others have 
pointed out much of the "performance" is responsiveness of authoritative 
servers for zones in your queryfile.  For me, this was an interesting thing to 
test since it finds many of the same issues seen in running DNS servers 
day-to-day.

Having said all that, in terms of an approach to measurement...if I was more 
concerned about raw throughput of a specific name server software, I would be 
sure to setup a lab so that I could control "the Internet" and "remote server 
responsiveness" -- similar to what I'd imagine product stress testers do in 
their labs.  Build a query file with N random internal domains delegated to a 
farm of internal NS over a fast LAN...then run batches of queries with drop 
rate capped at some reasonable percent (I usually do 1% which is a lot better 
than what's generally observed in the real world due to upstream problems).  
This qps number will obviously be a lot larger since you are now closer to 
comparing internal vs end-to-end performance.

From: Kumar Ashutosh <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Monday, December 8, 2014 at 10:34 AM
To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: [dns-operations] DNS measurement standards

Hi
This may be a repeated question, but hoping a quick reply on this. There are 
multiple tools to measure DNS server performance. And there are umpteen ways to 
measure as well.
I have come across many tools like ISC queryperf, nominum’s DNSperf, Dnsbench 
etc…

I may start a debate, if I ask which one is the best. So let me ask which *are* 
the most popular and Is there a standard take on the way to measure.

Regards
Kumar Ashutosh
Microsoft

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