[Pdns-users] PowerDNS cannot handle the load?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

I benchmarked PowerDNS (both with the PostgreSQL and the BIND backend)
with a big zone ('.fr', 150,000 domains) and a big load (generated by
BIND/contrib queryperf).

PowerDNS cannot handle the load, the response times are ridiculy slow
and very often, the server completely stops answering. For instance,
here are two tests performed in sequence, notice the sharp decrease of
the performances:

[...]
  Queries sent:         1000 queries
  Queries completed:    1000 queries
  Queries lost:         0 queries

  Percentage completed: 100.00%
  Percentage lost:        0.00%

  Started at:           Wed Apr  9 13:51:36 2003
  Finished at:          Wed Apr  9 13:51:36 2003
  Ran for:              0.067389 seconds

  Queries per second:   14839.217083 qps

[...]

  Queries sent:         1000 queries
  Queries completed:    1000 queries
  Queries lost:         0 queries

  Percentage completed: 100.00%
  Percentage lost:        0.00%

  Started at:           Wed Apr  9 13:51:39 2003
  Finished at:          Wed Apr  9 13:51:44 2003
  Ran for:              5.173813 seconds

  Queries per second:   193.281048 qps

Neither BIND9, nor nsd, exhibits such a dramatic change, even with
much higher loads.

I tried increasing distributor-threads to match the maximum number of
queries that queryperf can send (20, by default), with no results.

Is PowerDNS really useable for a ccTLD ('.fr' is not the largest one,
by far)?