Setting up a Root name server

[Barry Margolin]

In article <37D040FB.358F5AF2 at megabytecoffee.com>,
chris  <chris at megabytecoffee.com> wrote:
>> Thirdly, lookups for names in the root zone are rare unless you have
>> broken DNS software or have things like WINS clients looking for
>> NetBIOS names in the DNS. There are easy solutions to those problems:
>> like fixing the configurations and/or installing up to date DNS
>> software. [Hint: name servers that support negative caching are your
>> friend.]
>>
>
>If they are so rare, why does RFC 2010 call for a name server that needs
>to be able to handle 1,200 UDP transactions per second?? With less then
>5ms of latency. I have up to date DNS software. I actually track the BIND
>versions pretty closely.

They are relatively rare for any one site; once a root server has given you
the referrals for COM, NET, ORG, and EDU, you'll make very few queries in
the root zone for a couple of days.  However, when you multiply that by all
the sites on the Internet, it adds up, so the real root servers have to be
able to handle a high transaction rate.

This entire thread has been very confusing because you have since clarified
that you're planning on implementing a COM nameserver, not just a root
nameserver.  That's *very* different, and it could indeed provide some
modest savings.  I don't know how noticeable it would be, though; do you
really expect your users to notice that accessing www.yahoo.com has sped up
by 40ms?

Also, the speedup should only be significant for sites that are accessed
infrequently.  NS records for popular sites like yahoo.com, microsoft.com,
and netscape.com will get into your cache very quickly, and all your users
will be able to take advantage of those cached entries.  It's only the
first user to access a site after the cache entry has expired who will
suffer the extra 40ms it takes to query the TLD server.

Local copies of the top-level domains could be useful if you were running
applications that performed enormous numbers of DNS lookups in rapid
succession.  For instance, a web server log analyzer would probably be sped
up noticeably if you had a local copy of the IN-ADDR.ARPA zone.  You could
also perform well on DNS benchmarks.  However, I think you'd see less
benefit to normal user DNS lookups.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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