need information on bind performance on a Sun E220

[Kevin Darcy]

One thing to keep in mind about nameserver memory usage is that it's far
more a function of the zones you master/slave, and the *variety* of queries
you resolve recursively, than of query volume _per_se_. Our firewalls which
do web proxying or outbound email delivery, for instance, tend to get much
larger caches than internal caching-only servers handling the same query
volume. This is because the internal servers typically only get queries for
names in a fairly small subset of internal zones, whereas the external
servers are querying all over the Internet namespace and this tends to fill
up the cache.


- Kevin

Toshio Kumagai wrote:

> Hi Andrew,
>
>         How much memory does your T1 have ?
>
>   ###
>
> Andrew McNamara wrote:
> >
> > >    John> I'm trying to find out how many hits a second a Sun E220 can
> > >    John> handle running the latest stable release of BIND.  I need
> > >    John> this information fast so any input is appreciated.  Is there
> > >    John> some way for guess / calculate how many DNS requests a Sun
> > >    John> E220 can handle per second ?
> > [...]
> > >I'd guess that the E220 should handle at least 1000 queries a second
> > >if the box was dedicated to DNS and the name server could provide
> > >answers straight out of its cache. If the timestamps from tcpdump are
> > >to be believed, the name server on my 300 Mhz Pentium II running
> > >BSD/OS answers a query from its cache in ~1ms.
> >
> > On a 440Mhz Sparc T1 that runs nothing but bind, we find it starts
> > dropping queries above around 600 per second. Compiled with the Sun
> > WorkShop Compiler 5.0 and optimisation on, udp receive buffers
> > increased over the default.
> >
> > This is a real load, rather than some benchmark - caching, primary for
> > net.au, secondary for com.au. Named image is over 400MB.
> >
> > If you have a choice, don't run anything else on the named machine. It
> > need to be able to keep it's structures in RAM and reacts very badly to
> > having pages swapped out. Multiple CPU's won't help you currently
> > unless you have other load on the machine. An E220 is probably wasted
> > in this context - get a T1 and keep the E220 for other jobs.
> >
> >  ---
> > Andrew McNamara (System Architect)
> >
> > connect.com.au Pty Ltd
> > Lvl 3, 213 Miller St, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia
> > Phone: +61 2 9409 2117, Fax: +61 2 9409 2111
>
> --
>   Toshio Kumagai        (Toshio_Kumagai at Kumasan.ORG), Japan