[dns-operations] Vista and DNS traffic

[David Ulevitch]

On Sep 6, 2006, at 3:08 PM, Roy Arends wrote:

> On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:33 PM, Olaf M. Kolkman wrote:
>
>>
>> "If you adopt Vista, your DNS traffic is going to double,"
>> Mockapetris said in an interview. With many DNS servers already
>> running close to capacity, this can have serious consequences, he
>> said. "You're going to see brownouts. All of a sudden, it is going to
>> be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of slow
>> and gooey."
>>
>>
>> http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6112338.html?tag=nl.e550
>
> Dan Kaminsky countering Paul's claims:
>
> "First, while there are indeed a couple underprovisioned name
> servers, there's far more that have lots and lots of slack capacity.
> You need slack capacity to deal with shock load. The networks that
> would fail because of Vista's release, would fail because of a three
> day weekend.
>
> Second, Vista's not getting deployed all at once. This is no service
> pack that's deployed to a hundred million desktops via Windows
> Update! Mockapetris is correct in that there will be a noticable
> increase in DNS traffic, but that increase will be spread out over
> the course of a couple years. Slow increases like this tend not to
> cause the sort of catastrophic failure that Mockapetris refers to.

I told the writer the same things as well.  He choose to use my quote  
about this collapse being about as bad as all previous predictions of  
internet collapse though, the FUD quote.  C'est la vie.

One could even argue that as Vista is rolled out it encourages more  
adoption of IPv6 and thus the likelihood of an AAAA record returning  
a positive answer will eventually negate the "double the queries"  
argument.  Chicken, Egg, all that stuff... :-)

FWIW, 20% of all requests we get right now are AAAA requests.  Not  
sure what percent of those are retried though I'm sure they don't all  
make it out to the root servers as most of the glue, AAAA and A is  
cached on a recursive nameserver.

-david