Users of RBL's

[Matt Kettler]

Chris Hammond wrote:

> Ok, I am going to move to a later version of bind than what comes with CentOS
> 4 which is 9.2.4 and will see if the newer version performs better.  I have read
> alot of people complaining about binds speed.

Fair enough, but be sure the complaints that bind is slower than product X fall
under the kind of usage you're doing.

Rbldnsd clearly blows the doors of bind or tinydns (djbdns's authoritative
server) when you're mirroring RBL zones.. rbldnsd is designed to optimize this
kind of operation. It takes a lot of short-cuts a general purpose dns server
can't. But that's OK, because rbldnsd is not a regular DNS server.

Some old comparisons (2003):
http://www.ripe-ncc.org/ripe/meetings/ripe-44/presentations/ripe44-dns-dnscomp.pdf

Showed that tinydns was faster than bind for authoritative servers. However,
bind was clearly quite substantially faster for resolving/caching when compared
with dnscache (djbdns's resolving/caching server).

Of course, there's the old adage, there's lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Not
to mention those benchmarks are old.

There's plenty out there with results to the contrary:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.dns.bind/msg/f11b30ab4b3d29ae?hl=en&

I'd run my own tests which are as close to the actual intended use as possible.