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We are planning to set up our own dns-server for managing all our subdomians. I wan't to set the leasetime to 1 hour. We going to expect a peak amount of 20 Million DNS requests per hour. I want to know what kind of hardware we need to realize this. We plan to use a server with:

  • Intel® Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core Prozessor
  • 16 GB DDR 3 RAM
  • Gbit network connection
  • BIND based on Ubuntu x64 server.

Is this realistic?

// Update/Note: Later we have installed 3 of this Server with bind and a TTL of 5 Mins. Even with a peak of 40 million users (not unique) per day the servers ideling at least 10%-15% CPU load. RAM is also no Problem.

Arny80Hexa
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  • One thing to note: Realistically, you'll need at least two servers to keep things redundant. – Sven May 08 '12 at 10:14
  • Possible duplicate of [Can you help me with my capacity planning?](http://serverfault.com/questions/384686/can-you-help-me-with-my-capacity-planning) – Jenny D Mar 21 '17 at 13:43

2 Answers2

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Although I'm really no fan of using consumer CPUs for professional work that i7 will easily handle the work and unless you expect to have to hold simply enormous DNS cache entries then 16GB will be fine too. 20m/r/hr is about 5,555/s or about 85Mbps at a constant rate, are you sure you have that bandwidth entirely clear from server to your clients (i.e. ensuring any firewalls/load-balancers can handle that too)?

That said I'd personally spend a little less (maybe go for an i5 and 8GB) and buy two servers for resilience, imagine if that single consumer-grade 'server' goes pop! your service would be down until you could fix it right?

Chopper3
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  • Yes, I know about the issues with consumer-hardware and so we are planing a master-slave dns system. Firewall is a simple iptables-script we are using on other machines too. They are able to manage traffic up to 600MBit/s. So I think 85MBit/s will be no problem. – Arny80Hexa May 08 '12 at 10:21
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According to RFC2182 you need to have at least 3 nameservers that are not in the same subnet and preferably geographically diverse.

Like Chopper3 I wouldn't recommend consumer gear for nameservers. But then I really wouldn't recommend running your own servers anyway. I would recommend that with these numbers of queries that you rely on a managed DNS service as teams like mine have worked tirelessly to design these services to take incredibly high numbers of requests.

If you really want to run your own dns servers, rather than rely on a managed DNS service, then at a minimum I would suggest you look into running your nameservers either on some VPSs (Virtual Private Servers) or if you like hardware get a quarter rack in another Colocation DC in another city and sticking one pizza box (1U Rackmount server) in there and two in your primary DC.

Tim Armstrong-Ooi
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