I tried to nuke the spam... but committed criminal censorship instead

Cricket Liu cricket at nxdomain.com
Wed Jul 18 01:10:16 UTC 2001


> >                                         and even the most massive load
on
> >  a DNS server can be handles by feeble, 1st generation 386 machines,
>
> This is most certainly not true.  Many large sites have enough of
> a DNS load that they need some pretty honking-big nameservers, so
> that they can handle on the order of thousands of authoritative
> non-recursive DNS queries per second.  Certainly the root nameservers
> handle thousands of DNS queries per second, and a 386-class machine
> couldn't come anywhere remotely close to handling that kind of load.
>
> >  Hell, Paul Vixie runs one of the root name servers, F,
> >    F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET 39.13.229.241
> >  and it's some lowly old Sparc 2, and it's on of the busiest
> >  root namesrvers on the planet.
>
> I don't know for sure what hardware this machine runs on, but my
> understanding was that it was replaced a while back with something
> that can actually handle thousands of DNS queries per second.

f is two Compaq AlphaServers (IIRC, there's a switch in-between).
See www.isc.org/services/public/F-root-server.html for details.

> Moreover, the busiest root nameserver by far is
> a.root-servers.net, because of various stupid misconfiguration
> problems in various nameserver implementations in the world.  Most of
> the other root nameservers tend to have about half the
> query-per-second load of a.root-servers.net.

Yeah, a is basically the canary (as in coalmine).

cricket



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