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List:       namedroppers
Subject:    Study of Wide-Area DNS Traffic
From:       cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!news () ucbvax ! Berkeley ! EDU  (Pete
Date:       1992-05-08 23:11:06
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We would like to announce the following paper:

Authors: Peter B. Danzig  Katia Obraczka  Anant Kumar

Title:   An Analysis of Wide-Area Name Server Traffic
         A study of the Domain Name System

FTP  :   jerico.usc.edu: pub/danzig/dns.ps.Z

                       ABSTRACT

Over a million computers implement the Internet's Domain Name System 
or  DNS, making it the world's most distributed database and 
the Internet's 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 DNS's 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 internet of correctly 
implemented name servers.  It concludes by calling for a 
fundamental change in the way we specify and implement future name 
servers and distributed applications. 

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