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Over a million computers implement the Internets Domain Name System or DNS, making it the worlds most distributed database and the Internets most significant source of wide-area RPC-like traffic. Last year, over eight percent of the packets and four percent of the bytes that traversed the NSFnet were due to DNS. We estimate that a third of this wide-area DNS traffic was destined to seven root name servers. This paper explores the performance of DNS based on two 24-hour traces of traffic destined to one of these root name servers. It considers the effectiveness of name caching and retransmission timeout calculation, shows how algorithms to increase DNSs resiliency lead to disastrous behavior when servers fail or when certain implementation faults are triggered, explains the paradoxically high fraction of wide-area DNS packets, and evaluates the impact of flaws in various implementations of DNS. It shows that negative caching would improve DNS performance only marginally in an intern...
Danzig et al. (Wed,) studied this question.