Re: US Domain -- County Delegations

[Paul A Vixie <paul () vix com>]

a private conversation has borne some useful fruit:

> >  I gathered from some mail that Paul sent out recently
> >  that there was no problem with overloading of the root
> >  servers.  Something about the fact that his BSD/OS Pentium
> >  was handling 100lookups/second without breathing hard... 

>  The question is is the growth exponential?

the 100/sec number has been pretty stable for the last four months.  it was
80/sec last year.  it bursts up to 150/sec a few times an hour.  no big deal.
i could do 600/sec before i would have to worry about the cpu speed.  i would
fear for the interconnects if all seven root servers got 600/sec.

there are two kinds of root server queries.  one is a name server starting up
and trying to "bootstrap" its cache using its root.cache or named.ca or what-
ever file.  the other is when a recursive server doesn't have an answer and
has to delegate.  therefore the root server load scales with the number of
recursive name servers, not with the number of clients or the number of domains
registered.

if it were otherwise, the world would have melted long before now.