[summary]How many dns queries can a 400Mhz cpu support

hello, here is the summary.

Several suggestions, from a complete waste to 1300 queries/sec is a lot.

Christophe suggested  getting a few v100s instead, they are much cheaper
and just suitable for dns business, to horizontal scaling.

Peter kindly reminded me upgrading to bind9 before buying new hardware, and
not to use a precompiled package, but compile it with gcc and use optimizing
flags.

Tim  Chipman recommend alternates: djbdns/tinydns related tools, which is much
better, you can get it from http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html, also the performance
, if you want to dig into it :
http://lwn.net/2001/features/djbdns.php3
http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/514/2000/1/50/3160453/
http://forums.devshed.com/archive/36/2002/06/1/36632
http://djbdns.qmail.jp/performance/dnsspeed.html
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/blurb/server.html

thanks all. although my question haven't  been answered directly yet.
My conclusion is it depends. One thing I noticed that may effect the
performance of
a dns server is , response time .  for example, if a name query get 2s to be
travelling around
 the internet, and then back to the client , compared to a query only get 20ms
to get
answered, the former server must hold much more sessions than the latter , so
under
 the same query load, the former server may consume much more , maybe ten
time,
cpu power than the latter .  Since I live in a country that the latency to the
root dns server
is some high, so I believe I need more resources than others to process the
same load.

likun

followed is my original question:
============================
Hi, everyone,
I really wonder how many queries  per second a dns server can process
with what kind of hardware configuration.

I have got a dns server , SUN E450 with two 400MHz CPU, 4G mem, no
other application, dedicated for dns service, Runing bind 8.3.3

Now, it handles almost  1300  queries per second,  and have used up 80%
of  process power of one cpu , since bind8 is single-processed and
single-threaded ,  it can't use the two cpu at the same time, that means the
server has almost used up all cpu power this machine can provide for dns
service.  So I had to face  two choice: upgrade to bind9 or upgrade the
hardware, most probably the CPU .

But I recall a lot of people said that dns service needs very few cpu power ,
so Why a 400MHz cpu in my server can only support  up to  1300 queries per
second?

Does anyone has got any idea, in generally ,  how much load could be
supported
with a workstation like this, or with what kind of cpu power can you handle
how
many load ?

Any inputs are welcome
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