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What’s the best DNSONLY setup for cPanel? What DNS server performs the best under stress?

We set out to answer those questions by conducting a series of performance tests. Before disclosing the final results, let me walk you through what was done:

The three systems we tested are as follows:

• Bind
• PowerDNS
• MyDNS

They were all set up in a testing server with the following specs:

• 2048 MB RAM
• 2048 MB swap
• 2 CPU cores

The testing server was KVM-virtualized, so resources were fully dedicated to it.

From a different server, we attempted a maximum of 5000 concurrent connections to the testing server, for a period of 5 seconds.

In order to measure the performance of each DNS system when hit with those connections, we used dnsperf.

These were the results:

BIND

MyDNS

PowerDNS

In conclusion:

MyDNS is able to handle more requests per second compared to PowerDNS. But at the same time PowerDNS’s latency is better than MyDNS’s.

BIND, however, displayed the best latency by far and also proved capable of handling more requests in the tested timeframe than MyDNS or PowerDNS.