Hey guys, I was wondering how you load your dns boxes... The questions are:

1) How many hosting servers (web, db, etc..) are you running?

2) How many DNS servers are you running? (In a cluster?)

3) What processors are you using? (Single or dual? Speed?)

4) What disk configurations are you using? (IDE? SCSI?)

5) What operating system?

6) Any problems/things you would have done differently?

7) Do the DNS servers need as much power as the web/db servers?

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Thank you for all of your input, I hope this list wasn't too long!

Br

A P3 celeron with 256 of ram and a 20 GB hard drive would be more than enough for a DNS server.

You could get away with a slower processor if you have something laying around.

I'd suggest a small box (200 to 500 Mhz with 128mb of ram) as a dedicated DNS server. But if you are going to use a small box like that use an OS that fits the Job. OpenBSD works _very_ well with small packets and is very quick with them. They make fast, secure DNS servers.

Best Regards,
Ben Halsted

1:
]# ls /var/named/ | wc -l
6062

2:
four

3:
]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 851.878
cache size : 128 KB

4:
IDE raid 1, or single IDE

5:
Linux/BIND

6:
Nope

7:
they use almost NO processing power
]# uptime
7:52pm up 178 days, 10:18, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

Only thing you didn't ask, how much traffic it generates.

Max In: 69.9 kb/s Average In: 25.1 kb/s Current In: 23.0 kb/s
Max Out: 209.2 kb/s Average Out: 40.4 kb/s Current Out: 36.7 kb/s

Thats for over 6000 domains hosted, and over 100 machines using it for DNS.

*edit* per machine

Yaow. 6000 domains and it only uses 70/209 kb/sec traffic? What about I/O? Is it pretty rough on the drives?

aren't there some routers that can act as dns servers? probably for very small jobs though

25k/40k
the peaks are moving files, etc.

The load is almost nothing on this machine, it basically sits idle.

If you're just hosting DNS, a 16 MHZ 386 SX should do fine. If you've got a really huge amount of traffic, you might want a 20MHz 386. :)

Seriously, DNS is laughably easy to handle. For a very rough estimate: Take your monthly HTTP traffic, in TB. Multiply by 10. Get a system with that many MHz.

We use multiple DNS for redundancy, spread across different networks for speed. But in reality we could take all 6K domains and cram them on a P 75Mhz.

If you look at one of the root-dns server which handel all the information for all the top level domains (.com/.net) etc. where they are pushing a constant 10-15 mbits/second they are only using are just Alphas and Xeons and that is for a couple of million domains

Rus