Running PowerDNS actually makes a difference!
Posted by bert hubert Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:04:00 GMT
(Update: I’ve upgraded my Ruby on Rails, thanks for warning me! See here)
Well, big news, we’ve decided PowerDNS needs a new homepage, and that it needs to tell you why you should run PowerDNS. All pretty obvious of course, but it took us some time to realise PowerDNS use is spreading purely based on word of mouth, and not because we promote it so well (which we don’t).
The main page currently projects a sort of post-dotbomb shareware image. The wiki is fine as it goes, but only suitable for hardcore developers. And finally, the documentation contains lots of gems on how to best use PowerDNS, but it is all very spread out.
So, until we have our new homepage, some promotion. A large PowerDNS deployment is set to make 120 servers redundant. In energy costs alone this should save around 100kW, continuously (Update: ok, perhaps a bit less. Allow me some artistic license here. If you include cooling, it is not that far off.) . For reference, that kind of power requires four of these to generate:
We might as well follow Sun’s lead and rename PowerDNS ‘The most Eco Friendly Nameserver’. EcoDNS has a nice ring to it.
Some more promotion. Switching to PowerDNS does not just save the environment, it also makes your mail go faster. A happy PowerDNS user sent us this graph:
This says, in Dutch, “average mail delivery time, in seconds”. Note the dramatic shift very early Thursday morning, from around 1.8 seconds to 0.8, and later around 0.65-ish.
The almost threefold speedup happened immediately after the switch to PowerDNS. This makes some kind of sense, with the massive amounts of spam these days, a mail server can spend an awful amount of time trying to resolve strange sender addresses, and traversing often very bad or weird reverse delegations. Spammers have also been known to try to make their DNS so misconfigured that DNS-based filtering attempts fail.
No matter what the exact cause is, there is a nearly threefold speedup. Made all the more spectacular by the non-zero based graph!
We’ll try to move the hype from here to serious white papers on the new homepage. But it feels good to share some of the improvements people are achieving by switching to PowerDNS.
