[Dnsmasq-discuss] How small is a 'small network'?

[Norman Gray]

Greetings.

The dnsmasq documentation stresses that it's a good solution for 'small 
networks', but how small is small?  The overview seems to give as 
examples home networks, or mentions dnsmasq running in a router 
(implicitly a SOHO router).

I have what I'd call a medium-sized network of machines to look after, 
which -- depending on how I/we organise the network -- could represent 
between 500 and 1000 machines.  I'd like to provide DHCP and caching DNS 
to a good fraction of them, and provide authoritative (intranet) records 
for perhaps half.  Dnsmasq looks like it would be very convenient to use 
for that, but would those numbers tax dnsmasq unduly?

I would guess that DNS and DHCP wouldn't necessarily imply a huge load 
on a machine, but I'd guess also that the load would scale roughly with 
the square of the number of machines being served (or perhaps linearly 
both with the number of machines being served and with the number of 
authoritative local records).

The machines are heterogenous in use, as opposed to being a compute 
farm, or something else which would suggest that cache hits would be 
unusually common.

The manpage mentions that 'Dnsmasq is capable of handling DNS and DHCP 
for at least a thousand clients.'  That's about the number of clients 
I'm thinking of, so that's good, but is there a 'with ease' elided 
there, or a 'without overwhelming pain'?  Would I, in short, be storing 
up trouble for myself?

I couldn't find discussion of this in a quick search of the list 
archives, but I wasn't really sure what best to search for.

Thanks for any advice.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK