bind performance woes on solaris

[Christoph Weber-Fahr]

Hello,

I'm looking for some input on Bind performance numbers on Solaris.

I've done extensive reading in this list's archives, as well as
a number of other sources, but I didn't find a conclusive answer.

So my question is: what performance in terms of queries (answered) per
second can I expect from Bind running on medium sized Solaris Systems.

Background: we've been running various Bind versions on Solaris and
using a number of different hardware setups, but apparently we
now hit the wall at ~500 requests per second each (+/- 50% ) (and no,
tuning udp buffers/queues didn't do us much good. No, they don't
swap at all)

Now I've seen a few numbers and benchmarks in this list:

- Andrew McNamara reported a similar number ( 600 requests per
   second) in July 2000 [1]

- Matt Simerson presented a benchmark [2] at ~ 1200 qps for
   Solaris and 2000 - 5000 for FreeBSD (though from his
   description I'm not sure if he measured "how many
   answers can Bind churn out" or "how many requests per
   second can Bind process while 100% behaving according to
   specs and not dropping a single one" - I'm only interested
   in the latter)

- Brad Knowles reports [3] that in 1996 you could sustain 2000 rps
   with a DEC alpha.

- there is an HP paper [4] putting achievable numbers
   on Intel and HP hardware up to 8000/13000 rps for Bind9 and
   Bind8 respectively

So, from these and several other, less definite references I've
come to those (preliminary) conclusions:

- on modern Intel Hardware with FreeBSD Bind 8 or 9 should both
   get several thousand requests per second

- apparently there is a Problem with Bind on Solaris

- the ~250-750 rps limit we are seeing on our E4Ks and Netra T1s
   are not that unusual

- a number of people assume the rps limits to be higher for
   authoritative name servers than for (caching) resolvers

Any input on both quotes and conclusions ?
Is there any discussion/research/speculation available on the
relative weakness of Solaris based systems with Bind ?
If you are or have been running Solaris, what are your numbers ?

Any suggestions are gratefully appreciated.

Regards, and TIA,

Christoph Weber-Fahr


[1] http://www.isc.org/ml-archives/bind-users/2000/07/msg00225.html
[2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bind-users&m=99315975627678&w=2
[3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=bind-users&m=99436560621992&w=2
[4] 
ftp://ftp.cup.hp.com/dist/networking/briefs/cc3300_dns_server_results.txt