zlacker

>>fanf2+(OP)
It's bit curious that traditionally UNIX systems did not run local DNS resolver daemons and instead the resolv.conf (and nsswitch.conf) persisted for so long. In addition to potentially simplifying configuration, having a daemon would allow system-wide dns caching, something I'd imagine would have been especially valuable back in the days of slow networks. Unix has daemons for everything else so that's why it feels odd that name resolution got baked into libc

>>zokier+xB7
maybe for most cases nscd was enough. not exactly a dns-cache but a hostname cache on one layer up.

>>bandie+6J7
I used to work for a huge email sender (constant contact). Our mail servers needed to perform an absurd number of lookups while receiving and validating mail. When I was there, we used dnscache, running locally, on all our mail servers. But even with a local dnscache, the overhead of making DNS requests and handling their responses was high enough that adding nscd made a noticeable improvement in CPU usage.