FreeBSD bind performance in FreeBSD 7

[Kris Kennaway]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Kris Kennaway
>> Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 12:18 PM
>> To: Oliver Herold; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org;
>> freebsd-performance at freebsd.org
>> Subject: Re: FreeBSD bind performance in FreeBSD 7
>>
>>
>> Oliver Herold wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I saw this bind benchmarks just some minutes ago,
>>>
>>> http://new.isc.org/proj/dnsperf/OStest.html
>>>
>>> is this true for FreeBSD 7 (current state: RELENG_7/7.0R) too? Or is
>>> this something verified only for the state of development back in August
>>> 2007?
>> I have been trying to replicate this.  ISC have kindly given me access
>> to their test data but I am seeing Linux performing much slower than
>> FreeBSD with the same ISC workload.
>>
> 
> Kris,
> 
>   Every couple years we go through this with ISC.  They come out with
> a new version of BIND then claim that nothing other than Linux can
> run it well.  I've seen this nonsense before and it's tiresome.
> 
> Incidentally, the query tool they used, queryperf, has been changed
> to dnsperf.  Someone needs to look at that port - /usr/ports/dns/dnsperf -
> as it has a build depend of bind9 - well bind 9.3.4 is part of 6.3-RELEASE
> and I was rather irked when I ran the dnsperf port maker and the
> maker stupidly began the process of downloading and building the
> same version of BIND that I was already running on my server.
>> * I am trying to understand what is different about the ISC
>> configuration but have not yet found the cause.
> 
> It's called "Anti-FreeBSD bias".  You won't find anything.

This is false, but I didnt expect any better from you.

ISC widely rely on FreeBSD internally, and contribute *lots* of 
resources to the FreeBSD project including hosting one half of 
ftp.freebsd.org and employing several FreeBSD developers.

>> e.g. NSD
>> (ports/dns/nsd) is a much faster and more scalable DNS server than BIND
>> (because it is better optimized for the smaller set of features it
>> supports).
>>
> 
> When you make remarks like that it's no wonder ISC is in the business
> of slamming FreeBSD.  People used to make the same claims about djbdns
> but I noticed over the last few years they don't seem to be doing
> that anymore.

What, you mean "factual statements"?  NSD *is* faster, it *is* more 
scalable, it *does* support fewer features than BIND, and it *is* more 
optimized for those features (e.g. it tries to precompute DNS responses, 
which it can do because it doesn't support dynamic updates, etc).  The 
ISC devels acknowledge this.  BIND has architectural constraints from 
being a more complete DNS server solution.

> If nsd is so much better than yank bind out of the base FreeBSD and
> replace it with nsd.  Of course that will make more work for me
> when I regen our nameservers here since nsd will be the first thing
> on the "rm" list.

You're funny, Ted.  Somehow you got out of my killfile though, guess 
I'll fix that.

Kris