BIND vs ncsd

[Drew Marshall]

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Dhawal Doshy wrote:

> Personally i use djbdns as well and here a link to setting it up..
> http://wiki.mailscanner.info/doku.php?id=documentation:related_software:caching_nameserver:djbdns 
>
>
> but some time back i came across these comparisons which have me 
> re-thinking (me think??).
> http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dnscomparison/
>
> can we extend this thread into a healthy discussion (and not another 
> holy war) based on our personal experiences and benchmarks?

Well I enabled Bind 9 on one of my machines just to see what difference 
it makes and in my very (un)scientific tests I got

 From DNS Cache:

; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> @192.168.1.30 www.cw.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 9666
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.cw.com.                    IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.cw.com.             7200    IN      A       212.137.47.225

;; Query time: 271 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.30#53(192.168.1.30)
;; WHEN: Sat Jul 16 02:02:29 2005
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 44


And from the Bind9 Machine

; <<>> DiG 9.3.1 <<>> @192.168.1.31 www.cw.com
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 62643
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.cw.com.                    IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.cw.com.             7200    IN      A       212.137.47.225

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
cw.com.                 7200    IN      NS      ns0.uk.cw.net.
cw.com.                 7200    IN      NS      ns1.uk.cw.net.
cw.com.                 7200    IN      NS      ns2.uk.cw.net.
cw.com.                 7200    IN      NS      ns3.uk.cw.net.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns0.uk.cw.net.          172800  IN      A       64.69.177.79
ns1.uk.cw.net.          172800  IN      A       194.177.170.35
ns2.uk.cw.net.          172800  IN      A       194.6.79.4

;; Query time: 817 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.31#53(192.168.1.31)
;; WHEN: Sat Jul 16 02:02:20 2005
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 173

Now I know the MSG SIZE is large with the Bind9 look up but there is no 
mistaking the 271ms against Bind's 817ms.

Hardly scientific I know but that is why I have tended to favour DJBDNS. 
No Holy War here, if any one has ideas how to make Bind go faster I'm 
all ears :-)   (For the record it's compiled with threads on a FreeBSD 
5.3 box. Unthreaded look ups were in excess of 4000ms!).

Drew

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