Experiments and benchmarking to compare the speed of a Rust-based nameserver lookup to dig
Three things are tested:
dns_lookup crate in Rust. Nothing magic or custom here.dns_lookup crate, which uses C bindings. The old adage of "don't reinvent the wheel" rings true.dig command on a Linux machine. This is a common tool for looking up nameservers. If run on Windows, it uses nslookup instead. nslookup seems to be much slower than dig.[!NOTE] Results are highly dependent on the machine and network conditions. Below, you'll find the results a GitHub Actions runner produced.
Average time over 100 iterations of looking up NS records for mackenly.com:
Rust lib code:
- Average elapsed time: 462.738µs
- Median elapsed time: 193.694µs
- Fastest elapsed time: 188.866µs
- Slowest elapsed time: 26.781831ms
Custom Rust code:
- Average elapsed time: 2.823685ms
- Median elapsed time: 2.600598ms
- Fastest elapsed time: 2.262353ms
- Slowest elapsed time: 9.95269ms
Dig command:
- Average elapsed time: 19.073889ms
- Median elapsed time: 18.823442ms
- Fastest elapsed time: 8.433644ms
- Slowest elapsed time: 96.514507msThe crate returns IP addresses, while the custom code returns the domain names of the nameservers. These are not directly comparable. For my purposes the domain names are more useful. See #4 for more info.
If anyone else goes on this journey, I'd suggest checking out the following resources: