server configuration

Sheer El-Showk sheer at laudanum.saraf.com
Fri Jan 5 22:50:38 UTC 2001


Hi,

I am trying to plan a DNS configuration that will support a large number
of zones (possibly hundreds of thousands) and a commiserate number of
queries.  From what I have been able to glean from various FAQ's and
Dr. DNS, the limiting factor in a server's ability to serve domains is
memory (needing to laod the zone files in memory or in a data structure).

Does anyone have experience with large scale DNS setups.  Could someone
suggest what the saturation point (bandwidth aside) of an intel server
class PC would be (1 GHz, 1 Gig RAM, U2W SCSI, etc...).  Obviously there
are many variables so real examples would probably be most useful.

Also, Dr. DNS says BIND has no hard-coded maximum number of zones.  Can
anyone confirm this (someone told me that ~65k -- 16 bit number -- zones
was a hard limit -- might this have been a kernel open file handles limit
or something like that).  Also, what other (non-BIND) considerations might
there be if one is talking about hundreds of thousands of zones -- open
file descriptors is certainly one -- anything else?

I'm an avid Linux user, but does anything have a reason to suggest that
Linux might not be a viable platform for this scale of deployement
(specifics, not just "Linux is not enterprise ready" ;->)?

Thanks in advance,
Sheer







More information about the bind-users mailing list