DNS Caching

This was a dense work from MIT and KAIST where they gathered traces of DNS traffic to determine the effectiveness of DNS caching. There were two primary findings: DNS requests follow the known zipfian distribution, and low TTL DNS entries do not really affect the caching.

This was really really dense with a whole lot of figures and percentages. I think I followed most of it, with the argument that the zipfian distribution is correct being the most obvious. They argue it shows that caching is not that important, as most users only use the cache for a few minutes as they browse the same site. This is important as servers are using TTL-based load balancing.

Note that this only applies for addressing, not forwarding. I think this is a crucial point, as it allows us to distribute the load at that level. Since it's likely amazon.com owns that hardware, TTL multiplexing makes a lot of sense.

Interesting bit about scaling out DNS. I'm always interested in how these things have changed, as I feel like the internet has become much more stable since 2000. Then, the obvious question is: how did they stabilize it?