BIND 8.2.3 verus 9.x.x ?? in production

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Ray" == Ray  <reply_in at newsgroup.only> writes:

    Ray> In light of the numbers people have reported here, is there
    Ray> any speculation on why outsourcing would improve performance?

It depends on the definition of performance. Some people outsource
their DNS because it's less hassle. They don't have the skills
in-house or the people with those skills are needed elsewhere. An
outsourced solution can make DNS administation easier: there's a GUI
with meaningful help instead of a morass of config files to maintain.
So DNS administration can be done quicker by a wider pool of people
Another "performance" criteria is robustness. An outsourced solution
should be far more reliable than an in-house service. The outsourced
solution should be provided on dedicated hardware with no single point
of failure. It's quicker and cheaper to buy that service than build
and operate your own. A further consideration is DNS maintenance: the
outsource provider has to keep the infrastructure in good order,
installing patches, monitoring the systems, etc , etc. Finally, an
outsource provider can offer an SLA.

Improving the response times for queries can also happen, but this is
really a negligible benefit. Who cares or even notices if a DNS lookup
takes 500 or 5 ms to be answered? The main factor for that is putting
the name servers at locations on the net -- like Internet exchange
points -- that have very good interconnectivity. This is where Nominum
puts its name servers for its outsourced solution, GNS. A White Paper
on Nominum's GNS infrastructure can be found at:
   http://www.nominum.com/resources/whitepapers/gns-white-paper.html

    Ray> We're running Redhat Linux 6.2 and BIND v8.2.3 on Pentium
    Ray> 75's with 64 MB of RAM and 408 MB hard drives (no graphical
    Ray> interface and all the rest of the unneeded stuff
    Ray> uninstalled), and it appears to be handling the load of a
    Ray> multinational corporation just fine.  Admittedly the zones
    Ray> are very small. What kind of hits-per-second limit would you
    Ray> folks guess we should be having? We're running about 2 per
    Ray> second now.

This seems very low for "a multinational corporation". A name server
for the corner shop might deal with that level of traffic. Tens or
even low hundreds of queries a second would be more typicial of a
large multinational or big ISP.


BTW, the newsgroup is bidirectionally gatewayed into a mailing list,
bind-users. Hiding your email address or providing an address that
cannot be replied to is VERY anti-social. It doesn't even prevent
spam, so what's the point? Apart from annoying people of course...