[RSSAC Caucus] Revisiting RSSAC002v3

[Paul Hoffman]

On Aug 19, 2019, at 1:11 AM, Andrew McConachie <andrew.mcconachie at icann.org> wrote:
> The purpose of this mail is to solicit feedback on whether a new version of RSSAC002 is needed. If you feel there is a compelling reason for the RSSAC to produce a new version of RSSAC002 please reply all to this email. Please explain the reason why and which measurement(s) you believe should be altered.
> 
> Please reply all to this email by September 1, 2019.
> 

It seems worthwhile creating a v4 for the following reasons:

- v3 uses the term "latency" in a way that that is very different from that which the Metrics Work Party is. In the v3 document, "latency" is the delay in publication of a new root zone, whereas in the Metrics WP document, "latency" is the amount of time it takes for a response to a DNS query to be received. The latter is the much more common usage of "latency" in the DNS world. The Metrics WP document uses "staleness" for the concept from v3. I propose that v4 start using "staleness" to match the more common usage in the DNS world. Note that the metric doesn't need to be renamed: it remains "load-time", which is different than either "latency" or "staleness".

- To make it clearer that root zone size is not being measured by the RSOs, I propose moving that entire discussion to its own section.

- A second root zone metrics that might be measured is "number of records changed". It will always be at least 1 (for the SOA), but it might be useful to know how many root zones are just changing the SOA versus changing actual data.

- The DNS community would probably like to watch the adoption rate for QNAME minimization. To measure that, I propose a new RSO measurement: number of queries that are single-label requests that result in NOERROR responses. The latter part would eliminate effects of things like Chrome asking for more names. I recognize that this idea might not be popular for RSSAC, but it would be one of the best ways for the DNS community to measure uptake of the protocol.

--Paul Hoffman