Awesome

NSD

The NLnet Labs Name Server Daemon (NSD) is an authoritative DNS name server.

This fork of NSD can be configured so that the core domain name lookup data structure is a DNS-specific qp-trie; build with ./configure --use-qp-trie

build and test

The ./Build.sh script will configure and compile NSD for my test setup, and run the cutest unit tests. There are multiple builds, for each of the different possible name lookup trees. The builds are installed in the subdirectory ./IN/ in the source tree. Each IN/bin/nsd-* binary has a suffix indicating its configuration.

benchmark

With any build configuration, you can run ./Bench.sh. This compiles several versions of a small benchmark program which exercises NSD's name lookup trees. The script will download the Cisco Umbrella top-1m domain list (if necessary) before running the benchmarks. The benchmark is single-threaded; it counts the time for a million lookups of:

• yxdomain: known domain names

• typo: unknown domain names that are similar to known names

• nxdomain: completely random domain names

The versions are:

• radtreeperf: NSD's default radix tree

• rbtreeperf: NSD's alternative red-black tree

• qptreeperf: my DNS-optimized qp-trie

The following results were run on an Apple MacBook Pro (16" 2019, 2.6GHz Intel i7):

rb
yxdomain 1000000/0 1.658168000 seconds
typo     0/1000000 1.370699000 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.575745000 seconds
98307984 bytes allocated (93.754 MiB)
rad
yxdomain 1000000/0 1.069693000 seconds
typo     0/1000000 0.912661000 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.345298000 seconds
354436840 bytes allocated (338.017 MiB)
qp (old)
yxdomain 1000000/0 0.683194000 seconds
typo     0/1000000 0.810722000 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.362822000 seconds
151737648 bytes allocated (144.708 MiB)
qp (cow)
yxdomain 1000000/0 0.621896000 seconds
typo     0/1000000 0.794685000 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.388049000 seconds
99798928 bytes allocated (95.176 MiB)

The following results were from an earlier version of the qp-trie code, run on an Intel i7-4770 3.4GHz.

rb
99729296 bytes allocated
yxdomain 1000000/0 1.612399592 seconds
typo     0/1000000 1.436897592 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.538228288 seconds
rad
355016648 bytes allocated
yxdomain 1000000/0 0.865918251 seconds
typo     0/1000000 0.822637818 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.292481364 seconds
qp
152805552 bytes allocated
yxdomain 1000000/0 0.577171742 seconds
typo     0/1000000 0.759439270 seconds
nxdomain 0/1000000 0.287439416 seconds

Known problem areas

This fork of NSD has only been very lightly tested.

Tony Finch dot@dotat.at