Re: Minutes from San Diego

On Fri, 19 Jan 2001, Jaap Akkerhuis wrote:

> 
>     I've come to the conclusion that this effort
>     is being driven by the well-intentioned, but misplaced belief
>     that whois:43 is only used for domain related purposes.
> 
> Well, the discussion seems to circle around domain names, but that
> was certainly not the intention. At the BOF was also discussion
> about the use RIPE and friend make voor IP delegations, AS info
> etc.
> 
> I guess that the letter part is less visible for the public, only
> network operators care about this. Maybe that's why the discussion
> is dominated by the ``name'' crowd and not the ``number'' crowd.

I think the fact that there are only three RIR in operation today, and
only two query/response formats, means that there's really not a big
need for a more sophisticated Whois protocol for RIR managed data.

But I guess you can use Whois for domain names too.  :)

I wonder what kind of query load the various Whois servers get.  From
the RIPE statistics page:

http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/mrtg/noofqueries/noofqueries.html

You can see we get between 400 and 500 queries per minute, around 7 or 8
queries/second (or as I like to say, 7 or 8 Hz).

>From the ARIN VI engineering status report they report over 13
queries/sec in September 2000.

Can anyone running a domain Whois server report some load statistics
here?

I know a lot of queries from both ARIN and RIPE are people doing data
mining, and I suspect that this is true for all other Whois registries
as well.  We may want to split any work on new and improved data
distribution techniques into looking at ways for both single and
aggregate lookups.

As a side note on LDAP, Microsoft reports the following:

"The specific load that a single LDAP server can manage will depend on
several factors, including computer hardware (CPU, RAM, disk speed),
resource contention with other processes on the computer, network,
client application behavior and load, and underlying database
performance. You can expect to get approximately 150 lookups/second, 75
modifications/second, and 20 inserts/second on a P200 with 500 MB of RAM
going to a well-tuned, off-box SQL Server 6.5 computer on similar
hardware and a Membership Directory of approximately 500,000 objects."

That was from:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/Sitesrv/Technote/memdirct.asp

I'm not (necessarily) an LDAP fan, but what this means to me is that for
number registries at least, LDAP can probably meet the needs for
information distribution technically.

And to think, we're just about to roll out a new Whois server!  :)

Shane