BIND server dimensioning

[Brad Knowles]

At 12:12 PM +0000 5/15/01, Laurent Perruche wrote:

>  I'd like to know if there are some tips for designing a BIND server (on
>  Solaris) that can handle :
>  - about 3000 requests/second
>  - about 1000 requests/second
>  Did someone built such servers ? What hardware did you use (RAM, CPU...) ?
>
>  I'd like that my DNS service is available at 99.995%. What is the
>  architecture I have to use ?
>
>  I know that it may be hard to answer, but if some of you could describe me
>  their experiences in deploying BIND Solaris servers, it would be great.

	I don't know of anyone who has specifically done these things 
with Solaris.  However, you can read Rick Jones' papers on how they 
did these things with HP-UX -- see 
<ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/briefs/>.  You should also look 
at RFC 2870 <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2870.html>.

	I am not personally aware of anyone that is doing even 1000 
queries per second with a Sun/Solaris box, but it is possible that 
one of the root nameservers is running Solaris.  If you can find out 
which one might be running Solaris, you can ask them what they did 
and how they configured their machine.


	That said, it will depend greatly on the type of queries you're 
doing -- it's not too hard to handle 2000 queries per second when you 
are running an authoritative-only server, but it is much, much harder 
to handle 2000 queries per second when you're running a caching-only 
server.

	The former is pretty much entirely within your control, and you 
can add more memory, faster disks, etc... to keep up with the load. 
The latter is going to be largely dependant on the latency and 
connectivity between you and the remote nameservers, and that's 
really going to seriously cripple your expected throughput in a 
real-world situation.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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