This is a basic DNS bench-marking tool, written to be as portable as possible. As such I have tried to include only POSIX functions. It runs the tests in parallel to try and save some time, and has a rudimentary progress meter for signs of life. It is by no means perfect, but it is mostly functional. Nonetheless, feel free to try and improve it.
As to why I made it, I couldn’t find a DNS benchmarking tool. There were some online, which for obvious reasons are useless for local testing, and the others were fairly old and/or platform specific. Namebench was in the process of a rewrite and also was written in go. This is written in C to try and make is as approachable as possible.
It was developed mostly on Linux and Mac. Unfortunately Windows with mingw64 does not have sys/socket.h, so it is unable to be built. Enabling that to work with some macro would be in the future.
There is a preloaded list of 20 DNS servers and 50 hostnames to try out.
By default, all 50 will be tested.
You can add your own DNS servers with the -s argument and hosts to check with -a.
If you want to test less hostnames, you can do so by specifying the number to test with -t.
The number of times to test each hostname is defaulted to 10, but can be specified with -n.
Added DNS servers and hosts are the first to be used.
While running, a counter will show a completion percentage, although this may undercount due to the parallel nature of the program. Additionally progress will slow towards the end as the last servers are left to complete. Once testing has been completed, a list of DNS servers will be printed out from fastest to slowest, with the average response time next to them.
There is a package available on the AUR, dnscomp-git.
- Clean up the code and make it more readable and nicer
- Optimise a little
- Add more hostnames and DNS servers
- Allow piping of hosts and/or servers
- Windows socket support