[Pdns-users] Spikey response times in powerdns recursor

[Simon Bedford]

Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> On 17.03.2010, at 12:37, Simon Bedford wrote:
> 
>> This is what is causing the mystery for me, when its good its really good but then response times go crazy at a random time, its dropped our customer experience graphing from 99.987% to 89% (some of this will be the 3.1.7.2 cache maintenance bug though, in fact a larger proportion as we only have 1 of 4 upgraded to 3.2.1).
> 
> 
> I think you mean version 3.2, there is no 3.2.1 yet and as that point release were likely to be a security fix i thought i should point that out.
> 
> I wonder what you test for on your customer experience graphing, if it's only a set of say 500 of the most commonly used websites it would make a considerable impact on your graph should say all the authoritative nameservers of a medium sized ISP go down for a while or when some links were over load.
> The latter is frequently reported by http://internetpulse.net/ for example.
> 
> Neither me nor our customers ever had any reason to complain about pdns_recursor's performance in this field however, in fact our graphs showed it to give way less server failure responses than BIND9 for months and packet loss or network delay situations were handled more gracefully too.
> 
>         Stefan

Update on issues

I contacted the BBC and they fixed the routing to the lame name server 
we saw on some lookups, I have also disabled one of our servers that 
appears to have some subtle hardware issues which was also 
intermittently affecting the stats on response times.

I have now also completely upgraded to 3.2 and now our graphs and 
monitoring all look good once more, thats to Bert and Stefan for the 
guidance, cheers guys.

Simon