[Pdns-dev] Performance of KVS in dnsdist

[labs at hosting.de]

Hello Remi,

Am 15.05.20 um 16:10 schrieb Remi Gacogne via Pdns-dev:
> Hi Oliver,
>
> In itself, opening the CDB file is not an expensive operation, it mostly
> consists of one stat() call to see if the file exists, one open() call
> to open it then one mmap() call to map the content of the file into the
> memory of the process. Doing that once per minute should not be too bad,
> it might be perceptible on the latency on the request triggering the
> reload but that should not kill your performance since dnsdist does not
> parse the whole file at once. Note however that the content of the new
> file might not be in the file system cache, so there might a noticeable
> cost when subsequent queries trigger a cache miss, asking the content of
> the file to be loaded from the disk into memory. Whether that cost will
> make a noticeable impact mostly depends on the size of your file and the
> memory pressure of your system, a small file (~a few MBytes) will likely
> still have its content loaded in cache if it was very recently generated
> or copied.

thanks, this assessment helps me to understand the CDB format and its 
internal working.

> Is there any reason you are not considering KVS with LMDB instead? For a
> database whose content changes that often, that might be a better option.

Yes, but just my little knowledge about LMDB and my wrong thinking. I 
thought that this would be a "static" file which is read by dnsdist only 
once on startup.

But after a closer look, this seems to be exactly what we need. Thanks 
for your hints! I think we will try LMDB.


Wish you all the best,

Oliver