Resolving DNS Asynchronously - from 200 to 20000 resolutions per minute. | Hacker News Reader

Resolving DNS Asynchronously - from 200 to 20000 resolutions per minute.

catonmat.net

28 pointspkrumins11 comments

Isn't 340 requests per second a good way to get yourself blocked from the DNS server?

[8:26pm:~/dnscache] DIVISION:tqbf [0:9]% nsping -t 0.005 192.168.1.254
NSPING 192.168.1.254 (192.168.1.254): Domain = "local", Type = "IN A"
- [ 2 ] 109 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 135.227 ms [ 135.227 san-avg ]
- [ 3 ] 109 bytes from 192.168.1.254: 81.386 ms [ 108.306 san-avg ]

...

Not at AT&T apparently.

Pretty much every synchronous protocol on the Internet benefits immensely from parallelizing. Compare mtrr to traceroute. Bulk DNS lookup is almost entirely I/O bound, and so async sockets are pretty optimal.

You get a +1 for mentioning mtr (I Googled "mtrr" but assume you must mean mtr). Never heard of it before - downloaded via MacPorts and.. great stuff - I recommend checking it out to people who use traceroute and/or ping frequently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_%28Software%29

Sorry, I'm also coding and terms are bleeding about in my brain.

In the mid-'90s, some friends and I had a small contest on who could write the fastest traceroute. Sending the probes asyncronously gets you most of the way there, but there's a trick that would get you the first N hops for free, too.

but there's a trick that would get you the first N hops for free, too.

I smell a blog post/new HN post..! Well, I'm intrigued anyway.

I'll never tell. ;)

It doesn't work that well anymore anyhow.

I set my favorite networking guru on to this and he suspects you're talking about RFC 1393 - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1393

Of course, you'll never tell, but just posting it here in case it's interesting to anyone else!

Was that ever implemented?

Here's a fun response to that document, though:

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi01/cse222/papers/savage-tra...

At that rate it would take you about half a year to resolve every IP4 on the net.

According to http://www.zooknic.com/Domains/counts.html there are 107,235,401 domains, so you could resolve them all in under 4 days. Allow some extra time for the country TLDs, and perhaps subdomains.

Yes, when a task consists of mostly waiting it makes sense to do more than one of that task at the same time!

I'm glad someone cared enough to give back to the community and post this wonderful result.

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