fwdns

A DNS Forwarder, with some interesting features.

QuickStart

$ npm i fwdns -g
$ fwdns -h

  Usage: fwdns [options]

  Options:

    -h, --help                                       output usage information
    -V, --version                                    output the version number
    -p, --port [6666]                                Port to bind
    -l, --listen [127.0.0.1]                         Address to listen
    -z, --zone [8.8.8.8]                             Default zone, use system by default
    -t, --timeout [5000]                             Timeout forwarding requests
    --renew-timeout [3600]                           Timeout of auto renewal
    -f, --forward-zone [/path/to/forward/zone.json]  Forward zone setting, {"hosts": ["8.8.8.8"], "names": ["google.com"]}
    -s, --local-zone [/path/to/local/zone.json]      Local zone setting, {"abc.com": "127.0.0.1"}

Features

Fast Zone Switching

It's a very rare edge case for using a DNS forwarder when there is over thousands of forward-zone settings. There is a fork of dnsmasq solving the similar problems, both dnsmasq and unbound's CPU reach 100% over 10K of zones.

With a pre-indexed map, we can archive less then 1ms for the query over 10K zones search, the algorithm is the same as this fork although in JavaScript, the implementation is much more easier. (but slower)

Here is some benchmark result compare to regular loop, (code):

EndsWithLoop#hit x 758 ops/sec ±1.93% (81 runs sampled)
RegExpLoop#hit x 90.88 ops/sec ±1.84% (66 runs sampled)
ReverseIndex#hit x 719,606 ops/sec ±1.02% (83 runs sampled)
EndsWithLoop#miss x 365 ops/sec ±1.26% (77 runs sampled)
RegExpLoop#miss x 114 ops/sec ±1.12% (69 runs sampled)
ReverseIndex#miss x 560,464 ops/sec ±0.91% (83 runs sampled)

Cache and Auto Renewal

All records that get from backends, will be cache in the memory and expire regards to the TTL, via node-cache.

Additionally, a auto renewal policy is added for better performance. When the item is added to the cache, the timer start to renew the result in the right time if possible, right time means 0.8 of TTL, and when the query is not being seen for an hour, give up the next renewal.

Race Query

Sometimes the backend zones can be busy or the network maybe unstable for a while, we can waste some network and CPU resources to duplicate the request to different servers, and take the first response, this can be easily archive by async's race function.

Performance

Might be slightly slower then others at the first time or both hit cache due to JavaScript's performance.

But I think with the auto renewal and race query, this maybe faster then others in the most daily usages, from client's aspect.

Dependencies's performance

The libraries this project depends to, are not being maintained for a while, there are some performance tweaks can be done.

For example, the packing processes of DNS packet in dnsd, gets improved to 3x faster due to commit:

- Original x 4,172 ops/sec ±1.49% (82 runs sampled)
+ indexOf & substring x 11,699 ops/sec ±1.06% (84 runs sampled)
+ Buffer.from x 11,663 ops/sec ±1.17% (81 runs sampled)
+ Body Buffer x 12,691 ops/sec ±1.11% (84 runs sampled)