Art Of Geek

Windows Vista to overload DNS servers?

September 7th, 2006 at 10:28am madgunde

c|net news has posted an article discussing the likelihood that Windows Vista will have a negative impact on the performance of the Internet due to it’s adoption of the IPv6 protocol.

“If you adopt Vista, your DNS traffic is going to double,” Mockapetris said in an interview. With many DNS servers already running close to capacity, this can have serious consequences, he said. “You’re going to see brownouts. All of a sudden, it is going to be mud season on the Internet, where things will just be kind of slow and gooey.”

Others quoted in the article disagree, citing DNS’s robustness, and predicting that Vista will have little to no impact at all.

IPv6 is an upgrade to the current IPv4 internet address standard, which allows for far more addresses–crucial in this day and age where everything from cell phones to handheld video games will be connected to the internet. In all fairness to Microsoft, IPv6 is not a new technology standard. It’s been around for years, and is necessary for the continued adoption and growth of the Internet. Mac OS X has had IPv6 support for years now (since version 10.2 Jaguar, released in 2002), and no one has complained about it.

The Internet is not a static product. It’s like a living, breathing organism, always evolving, growing and repairing itself. Sure, there may be some DNS servers that are close to being maxed out, but they will be upgrades if/when the need arises. Not to mention that Windows Vista isn’t not going to take the market by storm. If Windows XP’s adoption rate is anything to go by, it’s going to take years for even a quarter of the Windows installations to be upgraded to Windows Vista. That gives the Internet a lot of time to react. If DNS servers start failing due to increased adoption of Vista, that won’t be Microsoft’s fault, it’ll be the fault of server owners who didn’t properly monitor their equipment and failed to be pro-active in adding additional capacity.

As for Microsoft, I applaud their decision to finally include IPv6 support in Windows Vista (assuming it doesn’t get cut like many other cool features). My question is, what took them so long?

Entry Filed under: Computing, Internet, Networking, Software