Baseline performance tests results

Results presented here show the maximum throughput of Kea using:

• A very basic Kea configuration
• The simplest traffic characteristics
• Results presented here showing top performance of single Kea setup (one server) and High Availability setup (two connected servers in the network)
• All tests here are type A - which are calculating top performance. Calculated rate will be used in tests type B.

Kea configuration

Tests here are using simplest configuration possible with default configuration.

• one subnet with one pool (/8 for v4 and /64 for v6)
• no options
• no host reservations
• no client classification
• lease lifetimes are longer than test duration (to prevent renewals)
• default values are used everywhere possible (e.g. congestion control disabled, LFC enabled for memfile)

Traffic characteristics

ISC's perfdhcp generates simple DORA/SARR exchanges without any additional options or option requests. Normally we configure perfdhcp to simulate up to 500 million different clients (to avoid repeating any client IDs in the course of a single test) unless it's stated differently in the test description.

Basic performance of memfile backend in non-persistent mode

Kea can run in a special mode, using the memfile lease backend without writing leases to disk. Everything is kept in memory (similar to keeping memfile on ramdisk).
Kea configuration, traffic specification and testing methodology is otherwise the same as with the basic test. The reason this data is presented separately is because it can't be compared with the results using the other backends. We strongly discourage people from using this mode in production because Kea will not retain information on existing leases after restarting.
Running Kea with memfile lease backend with persist option set to False is NOT RECOMMENDED!

Different Thread settings

This test measures how the different Kea backends respond to variation in the number of threads used.

• Using the basic Kea configuration described in the baseline test report
• Uses the simplest traffic characteristics
• We use the thread count settings ("thread-pool-size" and "packet-queue-size") that provide the optimum results from this test to establish the thread count configuration for the other tests.
• First set of charts (bar) are testing performance in relation to value of "thread-pool-size".
• Second set of charts (line) are using value of "thread-pool-size" which had highest results and testing performance in relation to "packet-queue-size" value.

Kea configuration (similar to the baseline tests)

• Other than thread count, the configuration is exactly the same as that used in the "Baseline results" test.

How various ways of host reservations configurations affect Kea performance

Each test has an additional description. Set of bar charts display results comparison of single runs presented in second part of this page.

Scenario: 1. Test key words: memfile multi threading reservations default global 30 mysql v4

How 3000 (30% of all clients) global reservations kept in mysql will decrease performance (leases in memfile)
Reservation optimization: None, default settings
MT settings: 14 threads, queue size 160 per thread

Scenario: 2. Test key words: memfile multi threading reservations default global 30 mysql v6

How 3000 (30% of all clients) global reservations kept in mysql will decrease performance (leases in memfile)
Reservation optimization: None, default settings
MT settings: 14 threads, queue size 160 per thread

Scenario: 3. Test key words: memfile multi threading reservations default global 30 postgresql v4

How 3000 (30% of all clients) global reservations kept in postgresql will decrease performance (leases in memfile)
Reservation optimization: None, default settings
MT settings: 8 threads, queue size 70 per thread

Scenario: 4. Test key words: memfile multi threading reservations default global 30 postgresql v6

How 3000 (30% of all clients) global reservations kept in postgresql will decrease performance (leases in memfile)
Reservation optimization: None, default settings
MT settings: 6 threads, queue size 70 per thread