massdns
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High-performance DNS stub resolver that resolves millions of domain names rapidly using publicly available resolvers.
massdns -r resolvers.txt -t SVCB,HTTPS --output j domains.txt massdns -r resolvers.txt -t A domains.txt --filter 0 --ignore 2 massdns -r resolvers.txt -t A -o J domains.txt
Summary
massdns is an open-source DNS stub resolver that resolves domain names in bulk, capable of over 350,000 resolutions per second against public resolvers without special tuning. It is a command-line tool, built from source with make and driven through options for record type, resolver list, concurrency and output format, so it fits into scripted pipelines rather than running as a service. It suits people doing large-scale subdomain enumeration and passive recon, such as resolving brute-forced subdomain lists or names pulled from certificate transparency logs, rather than one-off lookups. Development has slowed: first committed in 2016 with 28 contributors over its life, but only one commit in the past year and its last release was over two years ago.
High-performance DNS stub resolver that resolves millions of domain names rapidly using publicly available resolvers.
How massdns helps
Which of the millions of names in my brute-force wordlist actually resolve?
feeds the domain list through concurrent lookups against a resolver list and writes only the names that got an answer, at rates over 350,000 resolutions per second
Which subdomains pulled from certificate transparency logs are actually live?
resolves the extracted names in bulk the same way as any other input list, turning a passive-recon dump into a set of confirmed hosts
What DNS records exist for a huge list of names beyond just their IPv4 address?
accepts multiple record type queries per run so a single pass can pull A, AAAA, MX, NS or TXT records instead of one lookup per type
Which of my resolvers are slow or unreliable under load?
lets concurrency be tuned up or down, so runs against a custom resolver list expose which resolvers hold up and which cause overload or congestion
Can I recover the reverse-DNS names for a whole IPv4 range?
runs PTR queries across the address list in bulk and reports back the names attached to each one
Which names in a target's zone respond to non-recursive queries, hinting at cache contents?
supports issuing non-recursive queries, useful for probing what a nameserver's cache already holds rather than forcing a fresh lookup
Languages
Command line
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for massdns, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail massdns puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
3 entries
No entries match these filters.
- March 20241
- October 20211
- March 20201
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in blechschmidt/massdns, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 1 −2 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 0 +0 joined · −1 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 0 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 28 days first maintainer reply 28 days
- Open backlog 13 of 110 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 13
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 3,645
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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