stats & what exactly is a referral?

Ian Watts ian at radix.net
Wed Aug 14 20:47:12 UTC 2002


I'm trying to figure out exactly what qualifies as a "referral" in the
output of 'rndc stats'.  Most of my machines (all BIND 9.2.1) see very
few.  "DNS and BIND"  says that the referral statistic "is the number of
queries the name server handled that resulted in a referral."  Can someone
clarify for me what circumstances result in a referral?

I ask out of curiosity and because I have a perl script that reports on
query statistics and calculates queries per second from the stats.

Which leads to my second question.  Should referrals be counted towards a
total count of queries or are they like recursion in the sense that a
successful query that involves recursion will increment the counters for
both success and recursion?

In other words, should the total query count be:

success + referral + nxrrset + nxdomain + failure = total

or

success + nxrrset + nxdomain + failure = total


Inquisitively yours,

-- Ian



More information about the bind-users mailing list