Hi, The currently released 3.4.8 improves the zone-commit performance. Further optimizations (including catalog commit) will be released in 3.5.0 in September.
Daniel On 7/17/25 07:47, [email protected] wrote:
Hi
We're noticing that as our list of zones gets larger (about 480k right now),
adding a new zone or deleting an existing zone seems to continue to get slower.
We are always doing our modifications as part of a transaction, and the time
appears to occur in the commit phase.
An example timing.
# time /opt/knot/sbin/knotc ... conf-begin
OK
real 0m0.010s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.010s
# time /opt/knot/sbin/knotc ... conf-unset zone.domain example.com
OK
real 0m0.010s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.010s
# time /opt/knot/sbin/knotc ... conf-commit
OK
real 0m2.330s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.009s
#
As you can see, it took > 2 seconds to commit the transaction that removes just
the example.com zone. Similarly, it takes > 2 seconds to commit the transaction
that adds the zone back.
Given the time is real time and not sys/user, I presume knotc is waiting on
knotd to complete the work. I used perf to record a CPU profile of knotd while
the commit was running, but nothing hugely stuck out at me.
10.75% knotd libc.so.6 [.] __memcmp_avx2_movbe
◆
6.03% knotd knotd [.] __popcountdi2
▒
5.89% knotd knotd [.] ns_first_leaf
▒
5.25% knotd libc.so.6 [.] pthread_mutex_lock@@GLIBC_2.2.5
▒
3.85% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] 0x0000000000003706
▒
3.72% knotd knotd [.] ns_find_branch.part.0
▒
2.76% knotd knotd [.] trie_get_try
▒
2.63% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] 0x00000000000069d2
▒
2.34% knotd libknot.so.14.0.0 [.] knot_dname_lf
▒
1.92% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] mdb_cursor_get
▒
1.72% knotd knotd [.] create_zonedb
▒
1.68% knotd knotd [.] twigbit.isra.0
▒
1.68% knotd knotd [.] catalogs_generate
▒
1.36% knotd knotd [.] twigoff.isra.0
▒
1.28% knotd knotd [.] hastwig.isra.0
▒
1.28% knotd knotd [.] db_code
▒
1.27% knotd libknot.so.14.0.0 [.] find_item
▒
1.11% knotd libknot.so.14.0.0 [.] knot_dname_size
▒
1.04% knotd knotd [.] zonedb_reload
▒
0.99% knotd libc.so.6 [.] _int_free
▒
0.99% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] 0x0000000000003ce8
▒
0.96% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] memcmp@plt
▒
0.95% knotd liblmdb.so.0.0.0 [.] mdb_cursor_open
▒
0.88% knotd libc.so.6 [.] malloc
▒
0.88% knotd knotd [.] conf_db_get
▒
0.87% knotd knotd [.] ns_next_leaf
▒
0.82% knotd libknot.so.14.0.0 [.] iter_set
▒
0.75% knotd knotd [.] evsched_cancel
▒
0.73% knotd libknot.so.14.0.0 [.] find
▒
...
Our config is pretty simple, conf-export looks like:
server:
rundir: "/local/knot_dns/run/"
user: "nobody"
pidfile: "/local/knot_dns/run/knot.pid"
listen: [ ... ]
log:
- target: "syslog"
any: "info"
statistics:
timer: "10"
file: "/tmpfs/knot_dns_stats.yaml"
database:
storage: "/local/knot_dns/data"
mod-stats:
- id: "default"
request-protocol: "on"
server-operation: "on"
request-bytes: "on"
response-bytes: "on"
edns-presence: "on"
flag-presence: "on"
response-code: "on"
request-edns-option: "on"
response-edns-option: "on"
reply-nodata: "on"
query-type: "on"
query-size: "on"
reply-size: "on"
template:
- id: "default"
global-module: "mod-stats/default"
storage: "/local/knot_dns/zones/"
zone:
- domain: "example.com."
template: "default"
... 478,000 more domains all the same ...
Current files on disk are:
# ls -l /local/knot_dns/data/*
/local/knot_dns/data/catalog:
total 0
/local/knot_dns/data/journal:
total 0
/local/knot_dns/data/keys:
total 0
/local/knot_dns/data/timers:
total 75880
-rw-rw---- 1 root root 77697024 Jun 24 09:26 data.mdb
-rw-rw---- 1 root root 2432 Jul 17 01:05 lock.mdb
/local/knot_dns/data/timing:
total 0
This machine is not slow or constrained in any way. It's 24 core, 3.6Ghz, 64Gb,
NVMe drives, etc. Load is very low (<1) with plenty of free resources.
So what I'm wondering is:
1. Is this normal? It doesn't feel right that adding/removing a single domain
takes > 2 seconds regardless of the size of the existing zone database
2. Is there any way to improve this? Doing multiple adds/deletes at once within
a transaction works and we do that where we can, but there are cases where we
can't do that and I'd really like to understand why this is as slow as it is.
Thanks in advance
Rob
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