Unbound Operation Explained in Book

Authored December 2008.

We received a complimentary book by Jan-Piet Mens today, titled Alternative DNS Servers. It covers a whole host of DNS servers, including NSD and Unbound.

The book describes how to set up DNS servers and how to operate them. I found the section on Unbound to be fine (also NSD is fine). I cannot comment on the other products.

One section stood out as it has a performance comparison of the servers. The book has more details, below is one line of results. Here 10 queryperf machines query a DNS cache, and the average queryperf performance is noted. So the cache is doing 10x the number noted. The figures show similar results to what we find for performance comparisons in the NLnet Labs testlab. The results below have been found independently, and compare a greater number of products.

Server Queries/sec (10 clients)
MaraDNS 3 068
BIND 3 003
dnscache 2 928
PowerDNS Recursor 2 074
Unbound 8 276

The book reviews unbound version 1.0, and the config and operation is the same as 1.1 which was recently released. Unbound 1.1 has DLV support and improved statistics, which may be of interest.