Re: [ga] No more FUD -- what is the current size of the .com database?
George Kirikos wrote: Ken Silva was talking about how VeriSign must use "specialized" systems, and thus need price increases. "Specialized" - which means that they cost perhaps a few thousand dollars per unit more than commodity units. But that is a drop in the ocean of revenue that Verisign receives as the result of it's infinite extension of its monopoly under the 1995 Cooperative Agreement and ICANN's recent gifts. But it's not true that expensive machines are necessary - they are certainly nice, but not necessary. When we did our tests to see how big we could make the root zone before it went "boom" we began by simply elevating the then existing .com names to be root zone names - I think there were about 30,000,000 names in .com then. This was a few years back, but even then all we had to do was add a pile of memory to a decidedly non-studly, and definitely not expensive, PC. Generally one can use load splitters to front-end DNS servers to spread the burden across many cheap machines - it is not necessary that the splitters be stateful. That is, as long as the queries are UDP based. As soon as there is something that causes a shift to TCP-based operations, the load-splitting work necessarily has to become stateful enough to be aware of which TCP connection goes to which server. I, personally would go the lots-of-replicas-of-cheap hardware, i.e. the Google method, rather than go with expensive machines with redundant this and that. Moreover, gamer machines with recent PCI-X and PCI-Express slots can move data as fast as the more expensive iron, and if one doesn't insert an expensive graphics engine, they really aren't that expensive. There are plenty of solid 1RU platforms that have good reliability (I use Supermicro for my stuff and have never had a hardware failure over several hundred machine-years of service; I've had a few people deafened by the fans yes, but never a hardware failure.) If one isn't forced to squeeze into 1RU chassis and into full racks (there's a heat problem if one tries) then baker's racks with desk-side chassis can work very well. Microsoft used to do it that way in their server rooms. Memory capacity used to be an issue, but there are machines out there that readily hold 32 to 64gig of ECC memory, plenty for a server handing a zone like .com. --karl--
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