[dns-operations] root? we don't need no stinkin' root!

[Mark Allman]

> Still, I believe that a small resolver instance only needs a few
> DNS queries to root (per TTL), so switching everyone to always
> transferring the whole root should increase the total traffic
> considerably,

An anecdote here ...

I crunched a day's worth of DNS traffic originated at ICSI (which is
pretty much a "small resolver instance") from mid-Oct (which just
happened to be handy).  The entire root zone file would be ~725
full-size TCP packets.  Our two main DNS resolvers together sent
nearly 63K queries to the root nameservers.

I am not arguing either of these is onerous for us.  But, the notion
that snarfing a MB of zone file is somehow a considerable increase
in traffic vs. what we impose on the roots now seems dubious.

allman