kxdpgun – DNS benchmarking tool

Synopsis

kxdpgun [options] -i filename targetIP

Description

Powerful generator of DNS traffic, sending and receiving packets through XDP.

Queries are generated according to a textual file which is read sequentially in a loop until a configured duration elapses. The order of queries is not guaranteed. Responses are received (unless disabled) and counted, but not checked against queries.

The number of parallel threads is autodetected according to the number of queues configured for the network interface.

Options

-t, --duration seconds

Duration of traffic generation, specified as a decimal number in seconds (default is 5.0).

-T, --tcp

Send queries over TCP.

-Q, --qps queries

Number of queries-per-second (approximately) to be sent (default is 1000). The program is not optimized for low speeds at which it may lose communication packets. The recommended minimum speed is 2 packets per thread (Rx/Tx queue).

-b, --batch size

Send more queries in a batch. Improves QPS but may affect the counterpart's packet loss (default is 10 for UDP and 1 for TCP).

-r, --drop

Drop incoming responses. Improves QPS, but disables response statistics.

-p, --port number

Remote destination port (default is 53).

-F, --affinity cpu_spec

CPU affinity for all threads specified in the format [<cpu_start>][s<cpu_step>], where <cpu_start> is the CPU ID for the first thread and <cpu_step> is the CPU ID increment for next thread (default is 0s1).

-i, --infile filename

Path to a file with query templates.

-I, --interface interface

Network interface for outgoing communication. This can be useful in situations when the interfaces are in a bond for example.

-l, --local localIP[/prefix]

Override the auto-detected source IP address. If an address range is specified instead, various IPs from the range will be used for different queries uniformly.

targetIP

The IPv4 or IPv6 address of remote destination.

-h, --help

Print the program help.

-V, --version

Print the program version.

Queries file format

Each line describes a query in the form:

query_name query_type [flags]

Where query_name is a domain name to be queried, query_type is a record type name, and flags is a single character:

E Send query with EDNS.

D Request DNSSEC (EDNS + DO flag).

Signals

Sending USR1 signal to a running process triggers current statistics dump to the standard output.

Notes

Linux kernel 4.18+ is required.

The utility has to be executed under root or with these capabilities: CAP_NET_RAW, CAP_NET_ADMIN, CAP_SYS_ADMIN, and CAP_SYS_RESOURCE if maximum locked memory limit is too low on Linux < 5.11.

The utility allocates source UDP/TCP ports from the range 2000-65535.

Exit values

Exit status of 0 means successful operation. Any other exit status indicates an error.

Examples

Manually created queries file:

abc6.example.com. AAAA
nxdomain.example.com. A
notzone. A
a.example.com. NS E
ab.example.com. A D
abcd.example.com. DS D

Queries file generated from a zone file (Knot DNS format):

cat ZONE_FILE | awk "{print \$1,\$3}" | grep -E "(NS|DS|A|AAAA|PTR|MX|SOA)$" | sort -u -R > queries.txt

Basic usage:

# kxdpgun -i ~/queries.txt 2001:DB8::1

Using UDP with increased batch size:

# kxdpgun -t 20 -Q 1000000 -i ~/queries.txt -b 20 -p 8853 192.0.2.1

Using TCP:

# kxdpgun -t 20 -Q 100000 -i ~/queries.txt -T -p 8853 192.0.2.1

See Also

kdig(1).