From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.medford.ma.us>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 95 05:27:19 PDT
To: perry@imsi.com
Subject: Re: Netscape the Big Win
In-Reply-To: <9507231958.AA00910@snark.imsi.com>
Message-ID: <199507241221.MAA00651@orchard.medford.ma.us>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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R$ wrote:
> > I have serious concerns about whether the DNS stuff will really scale.
> > It's gonna blow out DNS server memory use, and the bigger packets means
> > a *lot* more TCP (vs UDP) activity.

Perry wrote:
> I'm not that worried. HESIOD has already shown that you can afford to
> store really mongo databases in the DNS, and with caching I suspect
> the TCP activity isn't going to be over very wide distances for the
> most part. 

Perry's right.

With a fairly current BIND (named), MIT stores on the order of 100-200
bytes of data per Athena user for ~25000 users.  MIT's been doing this
for years; for the longest time, they were using ~1 MIPS Vaxstation
II's with ~9MB of memory as DNS servers.  

1024 bit RSA public keys are ~128 bytes, as are digital signatures.
If we allow framing and similar stuff to expand the size of the data
to 150 bytes per key/signature, and if each user had a signed key in
the DNS, this would roughly triple the amount of data in the DNS.

This Is Not A Problem.

I haven't looked at the CPU load needed to compute the signatures, but
that takes place off-line, not on-line.

					- Bill



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