On 4 Nov 2002, Paul Vixie wrote:
And remember - Paul Vixie has shown that 10% of the inbound traffic at c.root-server.net is bogus rfc1918 sourced. Making the addresses public will serve as a DDoS vector against the root operators....
moreover, duane wessels came to eugene last week to tell us that only 2.1% of the queries hitting F-root were valid. there's got to be a way to make that better.
"For example, one bad release of popular domain software drove averages to over five times the normal load for extended periods. At present, we estimate that over 50% of all root server traffic could be eliminated by improvements in various resolver implementations to use less aggressive retransmission and better caching." Mockapetris P., Dunlap K.; Development of the Domain Name System, Proceedings of SIGCOMM '88, Computer Communication Review Vol 18, No 4, August 1988.