Flamethrower is a compact command-line utility for functional testing, benchmarking and stress testing DNS servers and networks. It is designed to generate controlled DNS workloads at high speed, making it useful for measuring resolver or authoritative-server performance, exercising protocol handling, and reproducing traffic patterns during testing.
The tool was originally developed as an alternative to dnsperf and retains compatibility with many familiar command-line options. Its workload model is based on asynchronous I/O and configurable concurrent senders, with query generation separated from transmission so tests can be shaped without changing the core sending logic. This architecture suits both maximum-throughput benchmarks and controlled experiments where traffic rate, transport and query shape need to remain reproducible.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports IPv4 and IPv6 together with UDP, TCP, DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS transports.
- Handles both GET and POST methods when exercising DNS over HTTPS endpoints.
- Provides modular query generators for building repeatable workloads, including generated labels and lists of targets supplied from files.
- Can send traffic at maximum speed or enforce a defined queries-per-second rate.
- Supports changing query rates over time, allowing stepped traffic patterns to be produced for load testing and metrics calibration.
- Reports sender statistics including transmitted and received queries, timeouts, errors, and minimum, maximum and average latency.
- Can emit detailed results as JSON for ingestion by monitoring, analysis or visualization systems.
- Lets users tune the number of concurrent senders, consecutive queries and delay periods to model different traffic behaviours.
Website: github.com/DNS-OARC/flamethrower
Support:
Developer: DNS-OARC
License: Apache License 2.0
Flamethrower is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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