need information on bind performance on a Sun E220

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Fri Jul 7 16:16:06 UTC 2000


>>>>> "John" == John Vrolijk (BCN) <John.Vrolijk at bcn.ericsson.se> writes:

    John> I'm trying to find out how many hits a second a Sun E220 can
    John> handle running the latest stable release of BIND.  I need
    John> this information fast so any input is appreciated.  Is there
    John> some way for guess / calculate how many DNS requests a Sun
    John> E220 can handle per second ?

Can you guess how long is this piece of string I'm holding up?

The answer is "it depends". It depends on what load is created by
other processes running on the E220, how many CPUs are in the system
and how fast they are, what network interface(s) are on the box, how
fast the network is, whether the names being looked up are in the name
server's cache or not (and if not, how many queries are needed to
resolve them and how long those queries take).

I'd guess that the E220 should handle at least 1000 queries a second
if the box was dedicated to DNS and the name server could provide
answers straight out of its cache. If the timestamps from tcpdump are
to be believed, the name server on my 300 Mhz Pentium II running
BSD/OS answers a query from its cache in ~1ms.

Try running dig. Ask the name server on the local machine for a name
that it's cached. The output from dig will tell you how long the query
took. Make an allowance for scheduling latency and interrupt handling
and you'll have a rough idea of the maximum query rate your box can
handle. The same goes for using a sniffer to watch for DNS queries and
replies and comparing the time between them.



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