Using an Oracle database within BIND 9.0.0.

Greg Rumple grumple at zaphon.llamas.net
Sat Nov 18 18:04:52 UTC 2000


* David R. Conrad (david.conrad at nominum.com) [001117 19:11]:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> At 12:49 PM 11/17/2000 +0000, network_noadle wrote:
> >My employers are about to launch a set of major web/mail hosting
> >services. The problem we have is scaling. We have been told that BIND 8
> >doesn't scale well past 6000 zones, and our sales predictions are for
> >10000 new zones per month.
> 
> Verisign (nee NSI) is using BIND (version 8.1.2) for .COM.  Last I heard, 
> .COM has over 32 million zones.

Actually last I checked, .COM was one zone with roughly 42,171,850
records (as of this mornings root zone files.)  This is VERY very
different from 32 million zones.

I can speak from personal experience of running Bind 8 with over 100,000
unique zones (7-10 records per zone), and can state that the startup
time was painful.  This was mostly due to the stat'ing, opening,
parsing, and closing of each of the 100,000 zone files (with tweaks to
bind, tweaks to the FS, and smart placement of these files, I was
eventually able to get this down to about 20 minutes (not CPU time, but
actualy time from startup until serving queries)).  I do not have
direct experience with this on Bind 9 yet, but it is only reasonable to
estimate that even on a fast RAID subsystem, the act of opening and
closing 100,000 file will take some time.

> All root nameservers use BIND (various versions of BIND 8).

Yup, keeping in mind that most of them load 1-10 zones (big zones never
the less).

> 
> >Our current plan is to modify BIND such that the initialisation
> >procedure skips the reading of the zone files and opens a connection to
> >the external database.
> 
> BIND 9.1 will include a simplified database (SDB) interface with an example 
> Postgres/SQL driver.  The driver is, last I checked, a couple of hundred 
> lines of C.  It probably won't take that much to write an Oracle 
> driver.  An alternative approach would be to create an alternative database 
> backend that replaces the rbtdb backend, but this is a non-trivial exercise.

So this is purely for the initial population of the in memory database?

Greg

-- 
Greg Rumple
grumple at zaphon.llamas.net



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