8.3 vs 8.4

Mark admin at asarian-host.net
Mon Dec 8 20:40:45 UTC 2003


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Reid" <jim at rfc1035.com>
To: "Mark" <admin at asarian-host.net>
Cc: <bind-users at isc.org>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 7:33 PM
Subject: Re: 8.3 vs 8.4


> My "arrogant presumption" is the truth for most DNS sites. Few
> people know or care about the query rates their name servers get
> or the size of the server's memory/VM footprint.

The former? Probably, yes. The latter? I think not. I have 1G of physical
memory, and carry about 15 zones, taking up about 80M. When I installed
BIND9, that number jumped to well over 300M, and kept rising real fast. Not
to mention that BIND9 kept collapsing, whereas BIND8 never has. I tried
using BIND9 again, around the time Verisign pulled their site-finder stunt.
But a new release/sub-release/patch kept coming out each day, and I finally
gave up on it; I got tired of experimenting with something new, whereas the
old was working fine. See, the question is not whether I have objections to
running a program, twice the memory size of the old, but whether I have good
reasons to move to the new version.

> BTW, the CHANGES file for the current BIND8 and BIND9 releases are
> about the same size, not that this is a metric of code quality.

But they are a good measure of its stability. A high frequency of
fixes/patches in a relative short time-span, tells you, statistically, that
it is unlikely that, come tomorrow, all of a sudden everything is fixed. And
I only need to skim over the subject headers on this list, to see that
people are still having trouble with BIND9. Maybe a huge ISP has so much
redundancy, that one BIND9 collapsing here or there is hardly noticeable. On
my system however, if the DNS server goes down, everything goes down. And,
like I said, I got tired of experimenting with something so vital.

- Mark



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