Memory leak cause of Comcast DNS problems

Sun Apr 17 16:39:08 UTC 2005

Regardless of whether it actually _was_ a memory leak,
or not, it appears that the impact was on a rather
large enough scale.

- ferg

-- Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> wrote:

| The maximum amount of memory to use for the server's cache, in
| bytes. [...] The default is unlimited, meaning that records are
| purged from the cache only when their TTLs expire.

The number of complaints I've heard that "DNS resolvers eat *so* much
memory" suggests that few people tweak the default configuration. 8-(

However, it's unlikely that this was the cause of Comcast's problems
because DNS cache overflows would have an impact on a much larger
scale.

--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg at netzero.net or fergdawg at sbcglobal.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/