On Tue, 18 Feb 1997, Karl Denninger wrote:
[...]
What do you think happens to the nameservers on the net when they're asked for a domain that doesn't have functional servers, and they sit and churn trying to resolve the names?
BTW, churn is the right word. Its taking anywhere from 5-10 *seconds* to come back as NXDOMAIN on each request for those that fail to resolve, and this is from the IANA roots.
So aside from programs like yours, who ever asks for domains that aren't in use?
How much bounced mail to postmaster do you see due to unresolvable domain names? I see lots, and every one of those churns and does the "wait for the NXDOMAIN response" thing -- in Sendmail, or some other tool, but the point is that this DOES impact service.
This IS a functional problem - and worse, all those non-existant zones and the VM churn they generate on the COM TLD servers is probably the REASON that we're looking at this kind of horrid performance!
Thats fair, I guess. Perhaps some of those $100 in fees for unused domains could be used to buy more RAM for root server operators. -- Matt Ranney - mjr@ranney.com
This is how I sign all my messages.
VM churn is a serious problem; its not just RAM space that causes (or fixes) it. There are a fixed number of contexts in a processor, and those contexts and VM page groupings are also of fixed size. At some point you thrash the VM system even if you can fit it all into RAM (God help you if you have to go to page space in a production system!) You're also assuming that NSI is getting the $100 fees. Why would you pay if you never intended to actually use the domain? You wouldn't. This correlates rather well with the crying that NSI has been doing in the trade press recently about how horrible their financials REALLY are, despite appearances to the contrary. Hell, if they only took real registrations as opposed to shams, by my best guess right now they'd drop the load by anywhere from 30 to 60 percent, and in ADDITION to that the other root servers, all but one of which they DO NOT pay for, would be more efficient for everyone. Has nobody looked at this before? Speaking of which, you folks *do* know that with the NSI TLDs on the root servers that they basically get 90% of their nameserver infrastructure, distributed at that, for free, and 4 out of the 10 "normal" servers are actually paid for with government funds (directly or indirectly; two are DOD, and two are public universities), right? -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity http://www.mcs.net/~karl | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | 99 Analog numbers, 77 ISDN, Web servers $75/mo Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| Email to "info@mcs.net" WWW: http://www.mcs.net/ Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | 2 FULL DS-3 Internet links; 400Mbps B/W Internal