On 8 Jul 2025, at 10:18, Carlos Horowicz <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> I must say I’m not particularly sympathetic to DNS over TCP. While it’s a 
> necessary fallback in some cases, it slows things down due to handshake 
> overhead, increased latency from retries, and the need to maintain state per 
> connection.

I agree that TCP transport has a different set of trade-offs from UDP 
transport, but different does not always mean worse. Being able to pass large 
DNS messages more reliably and having greater trust that the address of the 
other participant in a session is not spoofed are examples of advantages.

Note also that the setup and teardown handshake overhead is in principle able 
to be amortised over the many messages that might be exchanged over a single 
session, so over a busy session the aggregate cost tends towards zero and the 
cost for a message over a session that is already established is as close to 
zero as makes no odds.

The ability to handle large aggregate session state is something that has 
turned out to be manageable for HTTP and many other protocols. I don't know why 
we would assume that it's an insurmountable problem. 

There were times in the past where groups of DNS operators in metaphorically 
smoke-filled rooms said out loud that making TCP the primary mechanism was a 
sensible thing to do. Since this seems not to have happened you might 
reasonable speculate about the precise nature of the smoke, but the idea is not 
necessarily outlandish as you might imagine.


Joe
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