BIND 9 dynamic update speed

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:26 PM +0000 2003/01/24, andreas.pappas at bt.com wrote:

>  I have been doing some tests with BIND 9.2.0/ FreeBSD 4.2 regarding the
>  propagation speed of dynamic updates along authoritative nameservers. While
>  propagation times are very low (~1s), the rate of dynamic updates that a
>  primary nameserver can handle is also very low (1,000 updates per sec) and
>  drops to 300 updates per sec when the server has to deal with 3,000 queries
>  per second as well. These tests ran on Intel PIII 650Mhz, 128Mb machines.
>
>  I'd like to know if anyone is aware of similar tests or results.

	Were these recursive/caching queries or authoritative queries? 
Are you sure the machine wasn't running out of memory?  Were the 
queries being generated on the physical network or the loopback 
network?  Were the queries being generated by the same machine or 
other machines?  Have you given any thought to update the OS on the 
machine to FreeBSD-4.7 and the version of BIND to 9.2.2rc1?

	I've got some benchmarking results that I'll be presenting at 
RIPE 44 next week (you can see the previous version of this 
presentation at 
<http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dnscomparison/>).


	However, I can tell you that running FreeBSD 4.6.2-REL on a 
Compaq Armada 4131T (Pentium 133, 48MB RAM, 10GB IBM Travelstar 20GN 
HD), with the queries being generated on the local machine to the 
loopback interface, for caching queries on BIND-9.2.2rc1 I saw a peak 
of 317.77 queries per second for the root zone and 54.79 queries per 
second for the .tv ccTLD.  For authoritative queries with 
BIND-9.2.2rc1, I saw a peak of 228.68 queries per second for the root 
zone and 21.10 queries per second.

	However, none of these queries involved updates.


	I can say that, IMO, handling 300 updates per second while also 
handling 3000 regular queries per second seems to be very, very good 
performance to me.

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

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)