[dns-operations] BIND performance difference between RHEL 6.4 and FreeBSD 7

[Mike Hoskins (michoski)]

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us>
Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 5:14 PM
To: "dns-operations at lists.dns-oarc.net" <dns-operations at lists.dns-oarc.net>
Subject: Re: [dns-operations] BIND performance difference between RHEL 6.4
and FreeBSD 7

>On 04/23/2014 01:14 PM, Robert Edmonds wrote:
>> Doug Barton wrote:
>>> What's your goal? If your research shows that FreeBSD is a better
>>>platform
>>> for BIND, why is the answer not "Then use that?"
>>
>> Except the graph doesn't show that FreeBSD is a clearly better platform
>> for BIND.  According to the graph, RHEL doesn't drop any queries at all
>> up until 180 Kq/s, at which point FreeBSD is dropping ~5000 q/s.
>
>Yeah, I find that result highly suspect. There are a few other problems
>with the whole discussion, which is why I asked the OP what his goals
>are. If RHEL really is performing that well, and the OP needs to use
>RHEL for other reasons, then he has the answer.
>
>If the OP thinks that he's going to be getting more than 180k qps on a
>regular basis he has more difficult things to consider. For one, FreeBSD
>7 is more than a year past EOL at this point, so even if the RHEL qps
>numbers are right (which is highly suspect) if he really wants to
>compare FreeBSD as a platform he should be using 9 at least.
>
>... and to Jared's point, I agree that there are serious problems with
>FreeBSD, I left the project some time ago in part because I don't agree
>with the direction that they've been going. But the underlying
>technology is still sound for the most part, and if it works for a given
>use case it's worth considering.

I think it's also fair to assume that the larger, more DNS-focused
organizations will have large anycast (or similar) clusters with diverse
network, hardware, OS and even name server software...so the answer quite
possibly won't be "just use X" but more about understanding how to get
equally acceptable performance out of a number of common platforms.

Very good point though, comparing FreeBSD 7 to RHEL/CentOS 6.4 is not
apples-to-apples at all.  As to FreeBSD in general, I'm still nostalgic,
but honestly saw those problems coming since around the time jkh
left...and some days before (around the a.out to ELF move) based on how
the wind blew.  ;-)