server configuration

Mark.Andrews at nominum.com Mark.Andrews at nominum.com
Sun Jan 7 00:46:24 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?

	BIND 8 has a limit of 16 million zones (24 bits).  You won't
	hit this this limit on a 32 bit machine.  There are ISPs running
	with several 100,000 zone configurations.

> 

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
--
Mark Andrews, Nominum Inc.
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: Mark.Andrews at nominum.com



More information about the bind-users mailing list