dns and software, was Re: Reliable Cloud host ?

Fri Mar 2 19:32:03 UTC 2012

On Mar 1, 2012, at 10:01 AM, Michael Thomas wrote:

> The real issue is that gethostbyxxx has been inadequate for a very
> long time. Moving it across the kernel boundary solves nothing and
> most likely causes even more trouble: what if I want, say, asynchronous
> name resolution? What if I want to use SRV records? What if a new DNS
> RR comes around -- do i have do recompile the kernel? It's for these
> reasons and probably a whole lot more that connect just confuses the
> actual issues.

<software-developer-hat-on>

My experience is that these calls are expensive and require a lot of work to get a true result.  Some systems also have interim caching that happens as well (e.g. NSCD).

When building software that did a lot of dns lookups at once, I had to build my own internal cache to maintain performance.  Startup costs were expensive, but maintaining it started to space out a bit more and be less of an issue.

I ended up caching these entries for 1 hour by default.

</hat ?xml-fail>

-  jared