Title: An Analysis of Wide-Area Name Server Traffic


This paper examines the performance of the DNS based on analysis of DNS
traffic and classifies the major implementation bugs which considerably
increase DNS traffic. It proposes a fundamental change in implementing
name servers.

This work introduces a packet tracing and traffic analysis methodology
to evaluate the major implementation issues and quantify their impact on
DNS traffic. It concludes that negative caching would improve DNS
performance only marginally and that DNS replication cannot improve
resiliency in defective servers.

A new and significant idea introduced in this paper is that Distributed
Systems must be designed to detect errors in their components by
monitoring their own behavior. Some approaches at error detection are
outlined.

Even though a thorough explanation of the tracing mechanism and the
analysis methodology is provided, one notable flaw is that the data set
applied may be of too small a duration to properly represent overall DNS
traffic and therefore might have skewed results. Also while the paper
does a good job of identifying implementation bugs that spoil DNS
efficiency it stops short of providing solutions for them.

This paper is one of the early attempts at measuring DNS traffic and
provides a sound methodology for traffic tracing and analysis. While the
overall nature of internet and DNS traffic has changed a lot from when
this paper was published, the given approach can still be applied to
today's traffic data to draw current conclusions. 

The idea of self error detection in distributed systems introduced in
this paper has been widely applied to network management and is very
relevant in today's world.