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Is it a good idea to use NLB to load balance DNS requests to primary and secondary dns servers on port 53?

I.T. Support
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3 Answers3

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A modern server can handle 100kq/s or more, it would take a lot of DNS queries to get overloaded. Even most small/medium ISPs just have a primary and a secondary (sometimes a tertiary too) servers.

Many of the root servers are clustered, but that's primarily for redundancy. Root DNS servers commonly see 50kq/s (more on particularly busy days like holidays). But the root servers are a bad example to use for a typical network.

Chris S
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  • Your figures are wrong. Typical throughput on x86 servers peaks at about 30kqps. The individual root servers only see 5 kqps. – Alnitak Mar 29 '10 at 13:38
  • In 2008 Gentoo Linux 2.6.20 with Bind 9 cranked out 93kq/s, Fedora did 87kq/s, and FreeBSD did 84kq/s according to the ISC. ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/dns_perf/ISC-TN-2008-1.pdf and the C root servers has live statistics on their page (currently about 37kq/s): http://c.root-servers.org/ – Chris S Mar 29 '10 at 19:12
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Yes, it is a good idea.

IF you have the traffic. Root serves for . and the 2nd tier domain are clusters each. They handle significant amounts of traffic.

You servers EXTREMELY like dont care as you do not have any significant load.

Does it still make sense for higher uptime? Not really.

TomTom
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Using an explicit, separate load balancer for DNS is rarely sensible.

DNS queries are automatically distributed among all of the available servers and resolvers have built in fault tolerance; a server that goes down won't affect your DNS service since the resolvers know to try the others.

mbac32768
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