[Pdns-users] Re: PowerDNS performance compared to othernameservers

[bert hubert]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 11:02:03AM -0600, Geier, Michael D wrote:

> Requirements:
> 	Dynamic DNS ala DHCP
> 	SQL Backend (preferably Oracle)
> 	Speed would be nice
> 
> I just found PDNS today.  If anyone would like to comment on the above, 
> possibly pointing to optimal configuration/setup for Linux (RHEL), I
> would appreciate it.	

PowerDNS loves memory. Secondly, http://doc.powerdns.com/performance.html
can be very instructive. If you need the utmost of performance, you may want
to consider to run in 'all-cached' mode and invalidate parts of the cache
when you make changes, as described in the URL above.

If there is one major thing to remember, which I think Stephane may have
forgotten, it is to turn off most logging. log-dns-details=off. Logging is
very expensive, far more so than doing DNS in the first place!

RHEL has a lot of threading work incorporated which means that it should
benefit from multiple processors. Stock Debian will probably be hurt by
multiple processors!

We've done Oracle testing with a very large registry a long time ago and
back then we found that there were large performance gains to be had by
giving Oracle its own server, but we never figured out why.

So far MySQL is stil the king of speed.

Wrt 'Dynamic DNS', the whole issue revolves around authentication. Regular
DNS Update messages are not signed in any way and can be spoofed. Generally,
dynamic update providers use a protocol to convey updates to the database.
You'd need to be somewhat more specific.


> > Is this tuned configuration available somewhere? :-)
> > More details on backend (and maybe details about RDBMS), linux 
> > distribution, hardware would be great :-)

The test ran on a dual Athlon with 3.5G of memory and the highly undocumented
'xdb' backend, which is included in powerdns but very hard to use currently.

Thanks for your interest!

Bert.

-- 
http://www.PowerDNS.com      Open source, database driven DNS Software 
http://lartc.org           Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO