FreeBSD bind performance in FreeBSD 7

Sam Leffler sam at errno.com
Wed Feb 27 17:06:52 UTC 2008


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.
>
>   
>> 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.
>
> 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.
>   

Please save your rhetoric for some other forum.  The ISC folks have been 
working with us to understand what's going on.  I'm not aware of any 
anit-FreeBSD slams going on; mostly uninformed comments.

We believe FreeBSD does very well in any comparisons of the sort being 
discussed and there's still lots of room for improvement.

As to nsd vs bind, understand they are very different applications w/ 
totally different goals.  Comparing performance is not entirely fair and 
certainly is difficult.  Kris investigated the performance of nsd mostly 
to understand how bind might scale if certain architectural changes were 
made to eliminate known bottlenecks in the application.

    Sam


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