Warning: Version 3.4.2 of the PowerDNS Authoritative Server is a major upgrade if you are coming from 2.9.x. Additionally, if you are coming from any 3.x version (including 3.3.1), there is a mandatory SQL schema upgrade. Please refer to the Upgrade documentation for important information on correct and stable operation, as well as notes on performance and memory use.

Released February 3rd, 2015

Find the downloads on our download page.

This is a performance and bugfix update to 3.4.1 and any earlier version. For high traffic setups, including those using DNSSEC, upgrading to 3.4.2 may show tremendous performance increases. Please let us know!

We would like to thank Patrik Wallström of IIS, Kees Monshouwer and Fredrik Eriksson of Loopia for working with us on solving several issues that only became apparent on a 750000 domain (!) DNSSEC installation, the last of which we could eventually trace to memory fragmentation in the secure allocator of our cryptography library. This bug chase, which lasted for over a month, led to numerous other improvements, like better statistical metrics for plotting (actual CPU usage, uptime, key cache size, signatures/s) and the ‘sharding’ of our internal caches to better support multi-CPU operations.

A list of changes since 3.4.1 follows:

Improvements:

Bug fixes:

Minor changes:

commit 1e39b4c: move manpages to section 1

commit b3992d9: secpoll: Replace ~ with _

commit 9799ef5: only zones with an active ksk are secure

commit d02744f: api: show keys for zones without active ksk

New features:

commit 1b97ba0: add signatures metric to auth, so we can plot signatures/second

commit 92cef2d: pdns_control: make it posible to notify all zones at once

commit f648752: JSON API: provide flush-cache, notify, axfr-receive

commit 02653a7: add ‘bench-db’ to do very simple database backend performance benchmark

commit a83257a: enable callback based metrics to statbas, and add 5 such metrics: uptime, sys-msec, user-msec, key-cache-size, meta-cache-size, signature-cache-size

Performance improvements: