Overall DNS Traffic Trends

Details on the Chromium 87 update and its importance to the DNS community: Chromium is an open-source web browser developed by the Google-sponsored Chromium project. It is used as the base code for the more popular and feature-rich Google Chrome browser. As such, Chromium code is responsible for handling a very large portion of daily web requests from internet users. Prior to version 87, Chromium source code contained functionality that would send many lookup requests to DNS root servers that were considered unnecessary or “junk” requests. These requests largely existed to determine if an entry into the address bar was a URL lookup or a search term. On November 17, 2020, Chromium 87 was released. In this version, the developers had removed the code responsible for sending these types of requests. As the release was adopted, global DNS lookups started to drop and by January 2021 were down more than 40% across the DNS root servers.

This change is a good thing in the eyes of the DNS community. It will reduce operational costs and allow for better mitigation of threats such as DDoS attacks.

IPv6 Trends

The following charts highlight how IPv6 usage has changed over time. Since , IPv6 usage has from transactions a month to over . Additionally IPv6 share of traffic has from to

Root Server Trends and Comparison

Root servers are the backbone of the DNS system. They are divided into letter-coded groups and maintained by various organizations around the world. This breakdown shows the volume of traffic each of these root server groups are serving compared to one another.