Request for review of performance advice

[Havard Eidnes]

> OS settings and the system environment
...
> 2e) Make sure your socket send buffers are big enough. (not
>     sure if this is obsolete advice, do we need to tell people how
>     to tell if their buffers are causing delays?)

2e#1) Make sure your UDP socket *receive* buffers are big enough.
      If on BSD, monitor for "dropped due to full socket buffers"
      count in "netstat -s" output, and tune accordingly.  Note that
      this may be a symptom of mis-tuning of other parts of BIND,
      causing excessive CPU usage, which may contribute to this
      problem.
      
BTW, unbound has configuration options ("so-rcvbuf" / "so-sndbuf")
to tune these for only the name server; when I earlier looked for
something similar in BIND I could not find a corresponding option,
so had to do a system-wide tuning via sysctl, which isn't ideal, but
solved the problem in my case.

> named Features
> 3a) Minimize logging. Query logging is expensive (can cost you
>     20% or more of your throughput) so don't do it unless you
>     are using the logs for something. Logging with dnstap is
>     lower impact, but still fairly expensive.  Don't run in
>     debug mode unless necessary.

3a#1) Do not configure BIND with --enable-querytrace.  It most
      probably doesn't do what you might think it does, and is a
      major drag on performance.
      
See above under the new "2e#1" for a possible symptom...

> 4b) Set an appropriate MTU for your network. Ensure that your
>     network infrastructure supports EDNS and large UDP responses up
>     to 4096.  Ensure that your network infrastructure allows transit
>     for and reassembly of fragmented UDP packets (these will be
>     large query responses if you are DNSSEC signing)

Well, isn't the major goal of DNS Flag Day 2020 to eliminate
fragmentation for various reasons (some of them security-related),
and recommends to set EDNS buffer size to 1232 instead of letting it
be the present default of BIND of 4096?

Best regards,

- Håvard