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August 26, 2020 12:30 pm

A Chrome Feature is Creating Enormous Load on Global Root DNS Servers

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Chromium browser -- open source, upstream parent to both Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge -- is getting some serious negative attention for a well-intentioned feature that checks to see if a user's ISP is "hijacking" non-existent domain results. The Intranet Redirect Detector, which makes spurious queries for random "domains" statistically unlikely to exist, is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic the world's root DNS servers receive. Verisign engineer Matt Thomas wrote a lengthy APNIC blog post outlining the problem and defining its scope. DNS, or the Domain Name System, is how computers translate relatively memorable domain names like arstechnica.com into far less memorable IP addresses, like 3.128.236.93. Without DNS, the Internet couldn't exist in a human-usable form -- which means unnecessary load on its top-level infrastructure is a real problem. Loading a single modern webpage can require a dizzying number of DNS lookups. When we analyzed ESPN's front page, we counted 93 separate domain names -- from a.espncdn.com to z.motads.com -- which needed to be performed in order to fully load the page! In order to keep the load manageable for a lookup system that must service the entire world, DNS is designed as a many-stage hierarchy. At the top of this pyramid are the root servers -- each top-level domain, such as .com, has its own family of servers that are the ultimate authority for every domain beneath it. One step above those are the actual root servers, a.root-servers.net through m.root-servers.net.

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