BIND 4 / 8 / 9 performance

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Thu Feb 15 23:23:49 UTC 2001


>>>>> "John" == John Jetmore <jetmore at networkwcs.com> writes:

    John> ... data on server load and hardware snipped ...

    John> As these values continue to rise, the toll named is taking
    John> on the machines begins to rise also.  We are very aware of
    John> the need to upgrade to at least BIND 8, but we need some
    John> data to convince management to release manpower to do this.

The load on your servers is almost insignificant, so it's unlikely
you'll see any noticeable performance improvements by upgrading. You
might find that the logging and control hooks in BIND[89] are much
more useful for efficiently managing and configuring the name
server. Operating a BIND4 server is very clumsy and crude compared
with BIND[89]. How can you live without features like incremental zone
reload and refresh or (for BIND8) reconfiguring the server without
having to restart it?

I'd try telling management that they simply must upgrade from long-dead
code. BIND4 has been dead for years and BIND8 is in the departure
lounge. That - not quantifying the references to performance
improvements in the release notes - should be justification enough for
upgrading. I suspect those references are likely to be corner cases
rather than generic ones that would make a substantial difference to
throughout or CPU utilization. Those major optimizations should/would
probably have been done years ago.

    John> Specifically, does anyone have numbers on the performance
    John> increase realized from a transition from 4 to 8, or from 8
    John> to 9?  Numbers in terms of percentage of porocessor used
    John> would be most useful, but any numbers could be leveraged to
    John> give perspective.

BIND9 is quite a bit slower than BIND8 because of the internal
threading overheads. The performance hit should only matter to very
busy servers - root server territory of 1000+ queries/second - or
servers with tens of thousands of zones. How much slower BIND9 is
depends on the OS. OTOH, because BIND9 is multi threaded it does mean
that different threads can execute in parallel on a multi-processor.
Swings and roundabouts. Your mileage may vary. That overhead should
reduce in future BIND9 releases BTW.

Rather than ask here for numbers, why not conduct your own
experiments? That would mean getting numbers that were directly
relevant to your environment: ie on your servers with your DNS
traffic, running BIND version foo made impact bar on performance.


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