need information on bind performance on a Sun E220

[Andrew McNamara]

>    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 ?
[...]
>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.

On a 440Mhz Sparc T1 that runs nothing but bind, we find it starts
dropping queries above around 600 per second. Compiled with the Sun
WorkShop Compiler 5.0 and optimisation on, udp receive buffers
increased over the default. 

This is a real load, rather than some benchmark - caching, primary for
net.au, secondary for com.au. Named image is over 400MB.

If you have a choice, don't run anything else on the named machine. It
need to be able to keep it's structures in RAM and reacts very badly to
having pages swapped out. Multiple CPU's won't help you currently
unless you have other load on the machine. An E220 is probably wasted
in this context - get a T1 and keep the E220 for other jobs.

 ---
Andrew McNamara (System Architect)

connect.com.au Pty Ltd
Lvl 3, 213 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia
Phone: +61 2 9409 2117, Fax: +61 2 9409 2111