Roeland Meyer wrote:
> Greg Skinner wrote:
>> Once upon a time, there were some people who thought that if you added
>> more bandwidth to the Arpanet, the congestion problems that were
>> occuring at the time would go away. However, it took some studies by
>> a control theorist to show that changes needed to be made to the TCP
>> protocol to relieve congestion.
> Nice fairy tale, however, it does not apply here.
If you don't believe me, go to the IETF archives of 1987 (if you can
find them), and look up the discussions concerning congestion on the
Arpanet backbone of the Internet at that time. Or ask Van Jacobson
yourself. I am not making any of this up.
> Sure, but first you'll have to prove that there is a problem, Chicken
> Little. Show me a failure mode that I can repeat. Point to code that shows
> the architectural flaw. Yes, there is one small section, in the caching
> code, that is slightly non-deterministic in certain conditions. However, my
> personal examination did not yield any failure modes in the code. testing
> specifically, and generally, also did not reveal any flaws.
Here's an idea:
Find some site that supports a very large mailing list where the
subscribers are uniformly distributed throughout all the TLDs, and the
mail server does a bidirectional name-to-address lookup on each
incoming message (such things are done as part of spam prevention).
Now consider what the effect would be, particularly on the DNS server
that is taking on the bulk of queries from the mail server, if most of
those addresses were within lots of new TLDs, rather than deeper in
the existing tree). It seems to me that far more queries would be
going to the roots. So now a burden is imposed not only on the root
servers, but on any servers that might otherwise be able to cache
intermediate results.
If everyone (?) kept a copy of their own root zone, sure, you wouldn't
need the root servers any more. However, they still need to be kept
in sync. Having dedicated root servers is a tradeoff. It's far
easier to keep a small number of root servers in sync than a huge
number of DNS servers. After all, part of the reason we have DNS is
so we don't need to keep a large host table in sync any more, right?
--gregbo
