downside to 'minimal-responses yes;'?

[Kevin Darcy]

Dave Sparro wrote:

>I'm running into some slow performance on one interface of my
>multi-homed caching server.   Turning on minimal-responses seems to
>help out for now.  What problems could I be creating by changing the
>default setting?
>
I imagine that non-minimal responses are mostly useful in situations 
where you have a central caching server and a bunch of subsidiary 
caching servers forwarding to it using "forward first" (or the 
equivalent), as an attempt to optimize query performance. Since the 
subsidiary boxes build up a lot of referral information from the 
non-minimal responses they get from the central caching server, they can 
recover morely quickly if the central caching server goes down or 
becomes unavailable for whatever reason. With minimal-responses, those 
same subsidiary caching servers will have to start "from scratch" if the 
central server goes down, since they possess very little referral 
information with which to work.

If you don't have a setup like that, I'm hard pressed to think of a 
downside to minimal-responses. Certainly apps which are calling 
gethostbyname() and/or gethostbyaddr() through regular stub resolvers 
don't really care what's in the Authority or Additional sections of 
responses...

- Kevin