An analysis of wide-area name server traffic

Abstract

Over a million computers implement the Internet's Domain Name System of DNS, making it the world's most distributed database and the Internet's most significant source of wide-area RPC-like traffic. Last year, over eight percent of the packets and four percent of the bytes that traversed the NSFnet were due to DNS. We estimate that a third of this wide-area DNS traffic was destined to seven root name servers. This paper explores the performance of DNS based on two 24-hour traces of traffic destined to one of these root name servers. It considers the effectiveness of name caching and retransmission timeout calculation, shows how algorithms to increase DNS's resiliency lead to disastrous behavior when servers fail or when certain implementation faults are triggered, explains the paradoxically high fraction of wide-area DNS packets, and evaluates the impact of flaws in various implementations of DNS. It shows that negative caching would improve DNS performance only marginally in an internet of correctly implemented name servers. It concludes by calling for a fundamental change in the way we specify and implement future name servers and distributed applications.