KF Webs recently got access to the gTLD zone-files, of which we decided to have a closer look on the COM zone-file.

The COM zone file, known as com.zone.gz on the FTP server is 810 MiB of size. Uncompressed it is 3.7 GiB. There was a total of 117,379,441 records, as each domain name has multiple records due to the nature of the DNS system using multiple nameservers. A minimum of two is required, although it is recommended to use at minimum of three nameservers and not more than seven.

About 870 thousand records were A records for such nameservers, so those got deleted, we also ran the zone file through some shell scripts in order for it to become a list of unique domain names, resulting in a 685 MiB file.

Loading into the database and indexing it was going at a rate of about 560,000 domain names a minute. It was loaded into ta total of 11 MyISAM database tables in MySQL, then combined using a 12th table of the MERGE storage engine.

At the present time the COM zone-file holds 51,268,278 active domain names, meaning that on average a domain name has 2.2895 nameservers.

Read the full article and view the graphs at www.kfwebs.net