nameserver help & best practices

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mneese
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nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by mneese »

I have a 1and1 dedicated server...the default nameservers are their nameservers...

I am hosting about 30 domains....

Is it best practice to use their nameservers and turn off the server nameserver systems on my server, or would it be better practice and more reliable to switch to my local server as nameserver, bypassing the 1and1 nameservers..

Also, I prefer to use their mail server as opposed to my local server, just because i see all the headaches going on with mail servers.

So, keeping the mail server preferrence in mind, which would be the best way to do with low maintainace a priority...

Please offer specific suggestions, thank you in advance for any suggestions....
faris
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by faris »

Well, in theory if your servers goes down but you are using 1&1s DNS, then there is less possibility of emails being bounced back (rather than remaining in the sender's queue for while) than if your DNS went down with your server.

But personally I prfer things to be automated so I don't have to keep fiddling with DNS after creating a new account/domain, so I'd use Plesk's built-in stuff. It is the least likely thing to go wrong in my experience, and I really don't see the point of using 1&1s.

The best option is to have your own secondary DNS on a second server belonging to you. But for 30 domains I don't think it is worth it.

Email - email problems are mostly related to Plesk 9.x and mostly to do with Postfix. Ignoring that, the problem with letting anyone else do anything at all, be it email, dns or even hosting, is that you have no control over anything, and have no access to logs etc. So if something does go wrong you are in the hands of someone else to get it fixed.

Faris.
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Highland
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by Highland »

It used to be that you could use everydns.com for your DNS and have them slave off Plesk but I don't know if DynDNS (who has taken them over) will do that.
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by scott »

They will, they just charge a monthly fee now.
mneese
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by mneese »

Would my local DNS server resolve as quickly and efficiently as their (1and1) top-tier name servers...I am concerned because under some testing services my sites are DNS challenged, ranging from 2-20 seconds in some cases to resolve...I'm not talking about a ping...but i must admit I don't know if these free tests are in any way accurate..

So, for example a couple of very image dense Joomla sites are downloading in 15-20 seconds (as per testing service) with 5-10 seconds of that for the DNS resolve...actually 15 seconds is pretty good for an image rich Joomla site, but 'm concerned about all that time just looking for DNS....

Another image packed wordpress site is taking 20-25 seconds to download...once these sites are downloaded, they are quite snappy, so I feel I've got my PHP/mysql pretty well setup, and the server is very stable....

Upon looking at dynDNS, they are quite expensive...$29 per domain...but they do boast of multiple servers around the world...what would that do for DNS resolve speed?
faris
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by faris »

There's no good reason for DNS resolution for a page full of pictures even in a WP site to take 20 seconds - at least none that I can think of. Something wrong there, but I don't know what. I would not know where to start looking.

The thing is, the DNS lookup will be for the A record for www.your-wp-site.tld. This will happen once and take X milliseconds, then get cached in multiple places on the path to whatever system is viewing the page, at which point subsequent lookups for images and so on will take even less time. All this this, apart from that first lookup, should be independant of your system.

I suppose if your had a TTL etc of 1s or something then you'd potentially have no cache, but that' not likely to be the case.

Over to the experts.....

Faris.
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scott
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by scott »

20 seconds for one page is an eternity... are you using mysqltuner or a php accelerator?
mneese
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by mneese »

It is an eternity, but like I say how reliable is the free online testing? So for example one result says the dns lookup is 10 seconds, but the site itself takes only 6 seconds to load...how weird?

A ping test is resulting in milliseconds response, which is good, but something is really wrong here....I do have realtime rbls "off" for asl, as well i have the 127.0.0.1 listed at the top in my.conf.....

Yes I am using msqltuner and php accelerator.. mysql reads all good in the tuner and the accelerator I guess is working, I see the caching figures for the php numbers...

The sites actually load quickly and they are very snappy for joomla and wordpress, so I feel good about the server delivering data properly....

This is a new server for me, and I am untrained as an admin...but upon looking at the messages and errors, then looking at the conclusions in this forum and other Linux forums, I have concluded that this basic issue may actually be IPV6 related...I am getting tons of resolving errors and messages, so I will be disabling the IPV6 on my server this evening, because I will have to reboot...

Thanks for the responses, and I will re-post after disabling IPV6 to give the results....

Just for benchmarking here are todays results for two joomla sites (yes I know there are issues with the number of CSS files and script files, and this is a new site in progress...they will get compressed later)


Results For http://www.studiosevenpro.com
Total Results
Total HTTP Requests: 157
Total Size: 730865 bytes
Total Time: 18.772092 seconds

Object Totals
Type Number Size(bytes) Time (secs)
HTML 1 34025 18.772092
Images 125 387351 4.471246
Css 19 88382 0.66374
Scripts 12 221107 0.611654
Frames 0 n/a n/a
IFrames 0 n/a n/a
* Frames and IFrames are included in the HTML size and time

HTML Request Information
Type This Connection Average Of All Sites
InfoDNS lookup took: 12.149595 seconds 0.44510343548672
InfoConnection took: 12.161562 seconds 0.536217999025
InfoGeneration took: 0.826002 seconds 1.6176675505289
InfoDownload Speed: 2612 bytes/second
This result after removing IPv6 from my server:........pretty conclusive that IPv6 slowed my resolves down...went from 18 seconds to 8 seconds total download time...DNS lookup went from 12 to 2 seconds...

Results For http://www.studiosevenpro.com
Total Results
Total HTTP Requests: 157
Total Size: 730861 bytes
Total Time: 8.622684 seconds

Object Totals
Type Number Size(bytes) Time (secs)
HTML 1 34021 8.622684
Images 125 387351 4.4423
Css 19 88382 0.698507
Scripts 12 221107 0.60989
Frames 0 n/a n/a
IFrames 0 n/a n/a
* Frames and IFrames are included in the HTML size and time

HTML Request Information
Type This Connection Average Of All Sites
InfoDNS lookup took: 2.458449 seconds 0.44546007863291
InfoConnection took: 2.470601 seconds 0.53653999881147
InfoGeneration took: 0.363345 seconds 1.6170079848165
InfoDownload Speed: 11845 bytes/second

Results For http://www.allisonbellowsjewelry.net
Total Results
Total HTTP Requests: 183
Total Size: 936492 bytes
Total Time: 11.377994 seconds

Object Totals
Type Number Size(bytes) Time (secs)
HTML 1 7341 11.377994
Images 154 670863 6.024139
Css 15 87104 0.560321
Scripts 13 171184 0.571287
Frames 0 n/a n/a
IFrames 0 n/a n/a
* Frames and IFrames are included in the HTML size and time

HTML Request Information
Type This Connection Average Of All Sites
InfoDNS lookup took: 2.492372 seconds 0.44509800820863
InfoConnection took: 2.5046 seconds 0.5362125646036
InfoGeneration took: 1.7049 seconds 1.6176681804051
InfoDownload Speed: 1738 bytes/second
Again, this result after removing IPv6 from my system...very startling difference...7 or 8 seconds download for a joomla site, 154 images, 15 css files and 13 scripts...I can't complain about this download...

Results For http://www.allisonbellowsjewelry.net
Total Results
Total HTTP Requests: 183
Total Size: 938382 bytes
Total Time: 7.919204 seconds

Object Totals
Type Number Size(bytes) Time (secs)
HTML 1 7340 7.919204
Images 154 672754 5.9308
Css 15 87104 0.559651
Scripts 13 171184 0.58197
Frames 0 n/a n/a
IFrames 0 n/a n/a
* Frames and IFrames are included in the HTML size and time

HTML Request Information
Type This Connection Average Of All Sites
InfoDNS lookup took: 0.050056 seconds 0.44545161412611
InfoConnection took: 0.061841 seconds 0.53653152340042
InfoGeneration took: 0.77248 seconds 1.617007271354
InfoDownload Speed: 8668 bytes/second
Last edited by mneese on Sat Mar 20, 2010 12:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.
scott
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by scott »

try the apache benchmark utility:

ab -c 20 -n 1000 http://somesite.com/foo.php

note the above means "20 concurrent connections, 1000 times". Thats pretty brutal :P Might want to back it off
faris
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by faris »

It is almost certinaly ipv6. As you have seen, there's loads about this on the web with respect to Bind. Very similar problems as far as I recall when I came accross the topic a month or so ago.

I seem to remember that there was a specific thing you had to do to turn it off for real (I think Bind was ignoring one thing, but happy with another), but I don't recall what.

Faris.
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mneese
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by mneese »

Mike offered a complete "how to turn off IPv6 set of commands" that I will follow...his post was regarding some other issues about IPv6, and not necessarily my issue or anything like my issue....

I just ran the benchmark and I guess I should be concerned here because the "failed requests" is very high...
Server Software: Apache
Server Hostname: somesite.com
Server Port: 80

Document Path: /foo.php
Document Length: 205 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 0.995707 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 947
(Connect: 0, Length: 947, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 1006
Total transferred: 375018 bytes
HTML transferred: 210034 bytes
Requests per second: 1004.31 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 19.914 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 0.996 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 367.58 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 4 3.6 4 46
Processing: 7 13 24.3 9 197
Waiting: 1 11 23.1 7 187
Total: 10 18 24.7 13 197

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 13
66% 14
75% 14
80% 15
90% 16
95% 40
98% 141
99% 161
100% 197 (longest request)
It isn't till I lower the numbers to 5 and 50 that I get no errors:
Concurrency Level: 5
Time taken for tests: 0.326965 seconds
Complete requests: 50
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Non-2xx responses: 51
Total transferred: 18819 bytes
HTML transferred: 10455 bytes
Requests per second: 152.92 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 32.697 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 6.539 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 55.05 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 4 8.2 0 32
Processing: 10 26 10.9 29 46
Waiting: 0 22 13.3 22 45
Total: 10 31 10.0 33 56
This is my httpd.conf configurations:
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100

# KeepAliveTimeout: Number of seconds to wait for the next request from the
# same client on the same connection.
KeepAliveTimeout 15

## Server-Pool Size Regulation (MPM specific)

# prefork MPM
# StartServers: number of server processes to start
# MinSpareServers: minimum number of server processes which are kept spare
# MaxSpareServers: maximum number of server processes which are kept spare
# ServerLimit: maximum value for MaxClients for the lifetime of the server
# MaxClients: maximum number of server processes allowed to start
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves
<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 8
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 20
ServerLimit 150
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 4000
</IfModule>

# worker MPM
# StartServers: initial number of server processes to start
# MaxClients: maximum number of simultaneous client connections
# MinSpareThreads: minimum number of worker threads which are kept spare
# MaxSpareThreads: maximum number of worker threads which are kept spare
# ThreadsPerChild: constant number of worker threads in each server process
# MaxRequestsPerChild: maximum number of requests a server process serves
<IfModule worker.c>
StartServers 2
MaxClients 150
MinSpareThreads 25
MaxSpareThreads 75
ThreadsPerChild 25
MaxRequestsPerChild 0
</IfModule>
Maybe change some configurations here?
faris
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by faris »

Nah, that's just mod_evasive doing its job and blocking what it thinks is a DOS.

Don't worry :-)

Faris.
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BruceLee
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by BruceLee »

for testing purposes I would try to remove your server ip from /etc/resolv.conf, if it's there.
mneese
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by mneese »

Thanks for the suggestion brucelee...I checked and it is not there...

Please refer to the post above where I have placed the "before" and "after" results of some tests...

It is very clear that the IPv6 being enabled on my server was really slowing DNS resolves down, plus I was getting many, many errors resulting from unresolved DNS lookups...just more overhead I can do without...

Thanks for all the input from everyone...

By the way, this is the post where mike gives instructions for the disabling of the IPv6 on your server...the only variance I had to add to his instructions was that I had to reboot after completing the cycles...after reboot the verifications showed successful results...I think because this particular post is at the top in the ASL Support forum says others are having similar issues...
BruceLee
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Re: nameserver help & best practices

Unread post by BruceLee »

Great to hear.
The two sites are loading much faster now.
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