How much time before unbound drops an unanswered UDP query?

Viktor Dukhovni ietf-dane at dukhovni.org
Fri Mar 30 01:23:26 UTC 2018


When a query arrives over UDP, and no answer is available in the cache, it may take a while to obtain an answer.  After how long will unbound drop the query and no longer provide a delayed response?

If the client timeout is shorter than that, unbound will reply to a client port that is already closed, or in some rare cases already re-assigned to a new UDP socket making a new request.

I believe I am seeing the latter every few million queries with a sequence number mismatch for request/reply via UDP to an unbound server listening on 127.0.0.1.  My only explanation is that the high query rate (thousands per second) means that occasionally a new request gets the same port as a recently abandoned request whose UDP socket was closed.  Since I'm burning through thousands of ports per second, port number re-use within a few seconds of last use is somewhat likely, and if the nameserver is still willing to send answer after the client request has timed out, then that would be a way to explain the occasional sequence number mismatch...

I could tune the nameserver to give up sooner than the clients, or tune the clients to wait longer than the nameserver's willingness to send delayed replies.  What controls, if any are available to tune the nameserver side?

-- 
	Viktor.




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