[dns-operations] Forcing BIND to randomly expire records from cache ahead of time

[Damian Menscher]

Rather than address your question, I'm going to argue that the real problem
you should fix is the synchronized lookups.  Some ideas for smoothing it
out a bit:

  - Have you considered just turning off NTP?  ;)
  - Can the servers delay their start time by a random offset (but fixed
for each server) from the top of the minute?
  - Can the servers cache the result rather than looking it up so often?
 Then you'll be fine as long a they don't get synchronized to the TTL.

Damian


On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 2:06 PM, Mark Pettit <mark at pettit.org> wrote:

> Hi, folks.
>
> I have an issue with BIND cache timeouts, and I was hoping someone else
> might have some idea how to fix this.
>
> Here's the situation: we have a large number of servers that do a huge
> number of DNS lookups at the top of every minute. The TTL for the records
> they're looking up is 3600.
>
> What we've noticed is that on a host with a recently-restarted copy of
> BIND, we see huge spikes in DNS latency every 61 minutes. This makes
> logical sense, given the behavior of the DNS lookups.
>
> What is more interesting is that on hosts that have been running BIND for
> a very long time (on the order of months), the spikiness is not visible.
>
> Our speculation is that over time, due to the interaction between the 3600
> TTL and the "once every minute" lookup behavior, cache misses become
> randomly distributed throughout the hour, and don't cause the spiky
> behavior that is observed initially.
>
> One of our ideas to resolve this is to randomize the TTLs in the zone
> files, causing them to expire out of cache at different times, thus forcing
> more-rapid distribution of cache misses across the hour.
>
> However, this would involve some massive edits to our zone files, and
> isn't really ideal.
>
> What *would* be ideal would be if we could tell BIND to randomly expire
> some small percentage of cached entries ahead of the actual TTL expiration.
> This would serve the same purpose as assigning "random" TTLs to the actual
> records in the zone files.
>
> Does BIND have a config option like this? Has anyone else ever encountered
> this issue, and if so, how did you address it?
>
> Thanks for any advice, and I hope everyone has a fantastic Fourth of July
> weekend.
>
> Mark Pettit
>
>
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