Broadband bottleneck for Web 2.0’

When thinking about the performance of any computer system or network, the first question to ask is “Where is the bottleneck?” As demand grows, one part of the system reaches its capacity first, and limits performance. That’s the bottleneck. If you want to improve performance, often the only real options are to use the bottleneck more efficiently or to increase the bottleneck’s capacity. Fiddling around with the rest of the system won’t make much difference. This major shift in Internet applications has its unintended victims. One of them turns out to be the Domain Name System (DNS) – the global network of computers that maps domain names like www.nominum.com to IP addresses. This service is part of nearly every Internet interaction, and operators of major IP networks know that DNS is essential to service performance and availability.

As with many revolutions, this one is driven by the younger generation, which is adopting social networking sites like MySpace and video sharing sites like Google’s YouTube. But the general shift is not restricted to the young, as more mature consumers and businesses alike are exploring the possibilities of collaborative, media-rich applications. As oppportunities increase. so do the obstacles to hurdle them. Now let's take a look at various bottlenecks specifically for web 2.0 technology:

The term Web 2.0 refers to this next-generation of more collaborative web sites rich in media: podcasts, social networking sites, web applications and wikis among them. YouTube, the popular video sharing site acquired by Google in late 2006, is another example of collaborative, media-rich Internet usage that is wildly popular, relying on content delivery networks and increasing the load on the DNS.

If the DNS impact of social networking and Web 2.0 sites only affected users of those sites, the problem would be still be serious. Wireless carriers, for example, want to gain subscribers from the demographic that uses MySpace and FaceBook. As wireless connectivity increases, wireless users will take advantage of their ‘instant connectivity’ to use location-based social networks. Slow page downloads will reduce the value of the service.

But the ramifications go well beyond the social networking users.

An overloaded DNS server eventually slows down query responses to all queries – affecting all other services and users. Carriers have to continuously build out DNS capacity to provide adequate response times. And, as systems run closer to capacity, the network is more vulnerable to Denial of Service attacks or to DNS overloads due to traffic generated by viruses and worms.

For carriers that still rely on general-purpose Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) software for DNS, the growth of DNS load puts them in an impossible situation. A BIND server can only handle so much DNS traffic before it starts behaving erratically, dropping packets, requiring frequent restarts as well as more hardware. And the more servers you add, the greater your ongoing cost of operation. Both CAPEX and OPEX increase – eroding the cost benefits of using open source software.

To make it more complex, none of this is happening in isolation. This server proliferation takes place while carriers are trying to streamline and optimize the IP infrastructure to support network convergence. Triple- and quadruple-play services are adding voice, video and mobility to the IP infrastructure, increasing service level expectations and traffic. And emerging standards like DNSSEC will put further load on the DNS.

There is a need of highly itegrative approach to cope with all those threats to current web technologies.