Performance: BIND 8 vs BIND 9

[Simon Waters]

"Sasso, John IT" wrote:
> 
> I've been hearing second-hand that the performance of BIND 9 (w.r.t. #
> requests/sec) is, well, terrible compared to BIND 8.  I wish I could give
> specific revisions, but such was not given to me.  I have looked on the 'net
> as well as Nominum's site for any papers or other info for BIND 8 vs BIND 9
> benchmarks, but have not been able to find any.  I am told that BIND 8 will
> do about 8000 reqs/sec, whereas BIND 9 fairs worse.
> 
> Is there any substantiation to these claims?

Yes

BIND 9 has lower maximum throughput. More recent versions of
BIND 9 close the gap. BIND 9 also scales better with CPU as it
is threaded (with BIND 8 you could run multiple instances on one
machine, but that is wasteful of other resources), but you need
two CPUs (more or less) to match the performance of 8.

The actual requests per second depends on hardware you have. 

In many real life situations DNS performance is limited by
network bandwidth not server or OS resources, many big sites run
DNS happily on a few low end SUN or Intel PC's running BIND
without any significant load. 

What sort of CPU and network utilisation do you see on your
current nameservers? How many requests per second do you get at
peak?

>  We were considering on moving
> to BIND 9.2 in the near future, but not if its going to degrade performance.

Somethings are more important than performance.

> Any web pages and/or papers you can refer me to regarding performance issues
> and comparisons would be greatly appreciated!

Rick Jones at HP's Labs (Cupertino) has written a number of
reports. Including direct head to heads of BIND 8 to BIND 9 on
identical hardware, and running MS DNS on Win32, versus BIND on
GNU/Linux and HP-UX. (For the record MS DNS on Win32, beat BIND
on Linux, which beat BIND of HP-UX, all on the same IA64 IIRC,
which I think backs up my statement that there are more
important things than performance nicely). 

He usually posts here when new ones are out, so check the
archive.