CompuWorld

You "still" got nothing to worry about? Here I have something for you. Paul Mockapetris, who is widely credited with inventing the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), admits that Vista could slow down traffic on the Internet.

"If you adopt Vista, your DNS traffic is going to double," Mockapetris said in an interview. With many DNS servers already running close to traffic, 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."

Mockapetris claims that because Vista simultaneously supports the next-generation IPv6 protocol, as well as the current IPv4, it makes two DNS calls instead of one for every request. That means doubling the load on DNS servers, which in turn means far more sluggish reaction times, including brownouts.

Experts support Microsoft and suggest Mockapetris' predictions are related to his role at Nominum, the Redwood City, Calif., vendor of DNS products where he is chief scientist. Nominum commissioned a survey of the DNS servers run by large broadband ISPs. "It looks like they are right at the knee and curve and if Vista was all of a sudden deployed everywhere, we'd be having rolling blackouts," Mockapetris said. "For my home network, it is not going to matter, but for these people with millions of users, it is going to matter."

Vista's use of IPv6 will not disrupt the Internet at large, said David Ulevitch, chief executive at OpenDNS, a provider of free DNS services. "DNS can be improved, but predicting its collapse is just spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt)."

While there are name servers that are running close to capacity, Dan Kaminsky (A Independent Researcher), in a preliminary scan, said he found most networks have quite a bit of spare capacity. "Vista cuts into some of the slack space already in place for shock load," he said.