I just ran Juergen’s test with Deadwood and Unbound. Deadwood is able to resolve the list of domain names on my network in 2:42 (two minutes forty-two seconds) and 2:54 (the 2:42 figure was done starting Deadwood with no cache); Unbound needed 2:57 to resolve the same list. In addition, namebench shows Deadwood doing a lot better than Unbound (far fewer lost queries and better average response time to the queries Deadwood does resolve) on my machine.
Steve Gibson’s DNS benchmark tool is buggy and incorrectly reports that Deadwood drops most DNS packets; I have set up Deadwood to report every reply it sends as well as every incoming query, and have verified that Deadwood replies to most, if not all, of its incoming queries when Gibson’s DNS benchmark is run against it.
In addition, I have revised Deadwood’s internal hash algorithm to be more secure: The algorithm, in addition to using a multiplication constant that randomly changes every time Deadwood is compiled in CentOS Linux or a new Deadwood release is made (which Deadwood has always done), now uses an additive constant that is different every time Deadwood is started. Deadwood is hard-coded to use /dev/urandom (secret.txt in Windows systems) for entropy to generate this additive constant from (we also get a bit of entropy from the timestamp); if this file is not found, Deadwood will fallback to using a hard-coded additive constant for its core hash.
I would like to thank Juergen Daubert, Wayne, and Marlon for their bug reports, feedback, and suggestions getting programs to help debug Deadwood’s performance.
The snapshot can be downloaded here:
http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/deadwood-H-20100908-3.tar.bz2
Windows users can use this snapshot that has the improved performance (but not the improvements to Deadwood’s internal hashing function):
http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/Deadwood-H-20100908-win32.zip
Please report any bugs to the mailing list [1].
- Sam
[1] Crash reports are useless unless they are accompanied by a stack trace or a recipe for reproducing the crash; Valgrind errors are invalid unless Deadwood is compiled with -DVALGRIND_NOERRORS
Note: Yeah, I’m still looking for work. Send me an email if you have a job for me.
Update: Anyone who downloaded deadwood-H-20100908-3 should download deadwood-H-20100908-4; this update is a hotfix that fixes dictionary variables which I broke in deadwood-H-20100908-3. Note also that dictionary variables work with the most recent Windows binary; it was the improved hash compression security which temporarily broke dictionary variables.
Yes, I do perform regressions to catch things like this, but only for numbered release (e.g. I’ll do the regressions before releasing Deadwood 2.9.07) and not for snapshot releases.
