magamiako

The question is: Do you REALLY need to pay for DNS solutions? You sit here and concern yourself with DNS prefetching yet your SOA record for pinkbike.com shows TTL is 1 hour. I'd argue that having such a low TTL is such an unnecessary thing unless you're doing round robin DNS. You could DRASTICALLY decrease the amount of queries you receive by simply tuning up the TTL value. Hell, Windows clients alone cache DNS for 24 hours or TTL (whichever is shorter). So you already know that if your TTL goes beyond 24 hours you've already got at least that from Windows clients. Linux clients on the other hand do not do client-side DNS caching. I'm reading the dynect DNS solution--do you REALLY need anycasted DNS? I mean...seriously....I know people running massive amounts of sites on 1 to 4 authoritative name servers. The cost? Nothing more than it would cost to either host the servers or use the registrar's name servers (and with companies like godaddy, using their nameservers are free). Of course, you lose the ability to dynamically update your DNS records like you're doing with Dynect. But why? Seriously? You're seriously spending money on the simple fact that you want subdomains for every user of your site? If I were the IT guy I'd laugh at you if you approached me with that solution, especially if you mentioned that we'd be spending any money on it outside of infrastructure costs.

Further additions: You really don't need to pay for any sort of anycasted DNS solution. That is, you're better served by setting a reasonable TTL on your zone. The only time it would matter is if you're doing round-robin DNS, and it doesn't look like you're doing that. In the case of RR DNS, TTLs are set especially low to try and get users to load balance between IPs. It has its place, but I suspect your load balancing issues would be better solved elsewhere in your infrastructure long before you have to deal with pointing users to different servers. You can use various caching front ends to drastically increase the load capabilities of your site. If you set your TTL > 24 hours, Windows will always attempt to fetch a new record after 24 hours, however most servers should have already cached your information for the TTL value--so it's very likely their configured DNS server will respond in your place. It's highly unusual when DNS queries will actually have to come to your authoritative service from the same client repeatedly in such a fashion. And no offense to your relationship with DYNDNS (or for any person with OpenDNS relationships), but their services are usually not needed--and you're mostly paying for the front end, and some other snake oil. If I were looking to save money, your DNS service should be the first thing you evaluate.

I actually am in the middle of writing a rather large blog for a site with DNS which will cover everything from optimizing internal DNS queries, to DNS prefetching, caching, and how to improve resolution as a whole. For the most part, I'm not sure why you're too concerned with prefetching--it's not a bad thing, and only a good thing. As far as Windows goes, the DNS client caches non-existent records for 15 minutes. It will cache records it finds for TTL or 24 hours, whichever is shorter (by default). These values can be tweaked in the Windows registry. Chrome does DNS prefetching and also makes known invalid queries in an attempt to see if your ISP is hijacking invalid responses, which can break some of Chrome's features. I'll be sure to keep this site in mind when I finish the articles. Also, feel free to contact me at my e-mail address so we can discuss. Most linux distributions by design do not cache DNS queries, although DNS server software usually does when it's being done recursively. I'm not sure of any default aging in BIND, I think it completely honors the TTL. Clients however do not.