As per Relevance of the word distribution, we have this rfc below:
Network Working Group M.
Request for Comments: 1296 SRI
Network Information Systems
January 1992
Internet Growth (1981-1991)
Status of this
This memo provides information for the Internet community. It
not specify an Internet standard. Distribution of this memo
unlimited
This document illustrates the growth of the Internet by
of entries in the Domain Name System (DNS) and pre-DNS host tables
DNS entries are collected by a program called ZONE, which
the Internet and retrieves data from all known domains. Pre-DNS
table data were retrieved from system archive tapes.
statistics are presented on the number of hosts and domains
Table of
Introduction.................................................... 1
How ZONE Works.................................................. 2
Problems with Data Collection................................... 3
Scope of the Study.............................................. 3
N. Results...................................................... 4
N.1 Number of Internet Hosts.................................... 4
N.2 Number of Domains........................................... 6
N.3 Distribution of IP Addresses per Host....................... 7
N.4 Distribution of Hosts by Top-level Domain................... 7
N.5 Distribution of Hosts by Host Name.......................... 8
Future Issues................................................... 8
RFC References.................................................. 9
Security Considerations......................................... 9
Author's Address................................................ 9
This document provides statistics on the growth of the Internet
examining the number of Internet hosts and domains over a 10-
period. Before the Domain Name System was established,
all hosts on the Internet were registered with the
Information Center (SRI-NIC) and entries were placed in the
Host Table for each one. Data on the number of hosts for pre-
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
years comes from copies of the host table at selected times. The
system was introduced around 1984 but took almost 4 years before
was fully implemented on the Internet. However, by this time
hosts were no longer registered in the Host Table
In 1986, the ZONE (Zealot Of Name Edification) program was written
ZONE was originally intended to be used during the host-table-to-
transition period. ZONE would "walk" the DNS tree and build a
table of all the information it collected. This host table
then be used by sites that had not yet made the DNS transition
However, ZONE was never used for this purpose. Instead, it was
to be useful for collecting statistics on the size of the
system and the Internet
ZONE could not collect complete data on the DNS until around 1988,
because early versions of BIND (the popular Unix DNS implementation
had major problems with the zone transfer function of the
protocol. ZONE has been used in varying ways ever since to
this information. In the first few years, it was used to produce
wall-size chart of the domain tree. However, the number of
quickly outgrew the size of the wall and the charts were abandoned
In later years, statistics on the number of hosts and domains
extracted from the resulting host table, sometimes categorizing
based on top-level domain names or on computer system type
manufacturer
The time to gather the data also grew from hours to a week, and
size of the host table produced soon reached 50 megabytes. In
to reduce the amount of data collected, ZONE is now run in a
collecting only host names and IP addresses, ignoring protocol,
information and MX record data. The host table is then groveled
by some utilities (such as sort, uniq and grep) to produce
statistics required. ZONE is currently run every 3 months at SRI
How ZONE
ZONE maintains a list of domains and their servers and a
indicating whether information for a domain has been
loaded from one of the servers. Because of another bug in BIND,
must be primed with a list of all the top-level domains and
name servers. It then cycles through the domain list, attempting
contact one of the servers for each domain not yet transferred.
a server is contacted (via TCP), a Start of Authority (SOA) query
first sent to make sure the server is authoritative for the
being requested. If so, then a zone transfer query (AXFR) is sent
request all the resource records for the domain to be retrieved
When a name server record (NS) is received, the referenced domain
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
server are added to the list of domains to process. When
records (A, CNAME, HINFO, MX) are received, they are added to an in
core table of host information. The program ends when it has
through the entire list of domains without receiving any
information. It then dumps the table of host information to
HOSTS.TXT format file
Problems with Data
For various reasons, some Internet sites do not allow zone
of their domain servers. ZONE also eventually gives up trying
transfer a domain after too many failures. The number of
that could not be zone transferred during the 1-Jan-92 ZONE run
around 800 out of 17,000. Additionally, it is assumed that not
hosts on the Internet are registered in a domain server.
problems cause the statistics gathered by ZONE to be lower than
actual amounts
Manual review of some of the data collected by ZONE also shows a
of random entries in the DNS. Misformatted entries may cause
server or host records to appear. Many times a server is found
not be authoritative for the domain listed. Sometimes entire
are renamed and their old entries left in place for a
period, thus causing each host within that domain to be
twice. These problems cause the results of ZONE to be higher
the actual amounts
Manual scanning of the data indicates that the additional entries
insignificant compared to the missing entries discussed earlier
ZONE data can thus be viewed as the minimum number of Internet hosts
and not the actual figures
A final problem with data collection is that of expense.
domain information from every domain on the Internet generates
large amount of network traffic. It also puts an extra CPU load
each domain server it must contact. An organized effort might
considered to have only one such program doing this on the
at regularly scheduled intervals to keep the problem of multiple
collectors from occurring
Scope of the
A problem with counting hosts and domains on the Internet is
what the Internet really is. Finding host entries in the DNS
not necessarily indicate that the host is reachable from
Internet. Many companies have mail gateways between the Internet
their local nets, thus disallowing direct access. However, some
these companies advertise all their hosts, and some advertise
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
the gateway. Are these hosts on the Internet or not
Furthermore, many domains in the DNS are just mail-forwarding (MX
entries for off-Internet (such as Usenet) sites. Are these
really part of the Internet and should they be counted in an
size study
For the purposes of this study, a host has been defined as
[name(s),IP-address(es)] grouping discovered from the DNS.
prevents us from counting a host with multiple names or
more than once. However, this does not consider whether the host
directly accessible or not. When ZONE counts the number of
it includes all domains referenced by an NS record in the DNS,
including MX-only domain sites in the final results
N.
This section presents data from archive tapes of SRI-NIC from 1981
1986, and statistics gathered by runs of ZONE from 1986 to 1992.
N.1 Number of Internet
The chart below shows the number of IP hosts on the Internet.
are hosts with at least one IP address assigned. Data was
by ZONE except where noted. The following two sections are graphs
the data in this chart
Date
08/81 213 Host table #152
05/82 235 Host table #166
08/83 562 Host table #300
10/84 1,024 Host table #392
10/85 1,961 Host table #485
02/86 2,308 Host table #515
11/86 5,089
12/87 28,174
07/88 33,000
10/88 56,000
01/89 80,000
07/89 130,000
10/89 159,000
10/90 313,000
01/91 376,000
07/91 535,000
10/91 617,000
01/92 727,000
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
Number of Internet Hosts (linear
800|
780|
760|
740| *
720|
700|
680| .
660|
640|
620|
600| T *
580|
560|
540|
520| s *
500|
480| n .
460|
440|
420| .
400|
380|
360| *
340| H .
320|
300| s *
280|
260| s .
240| .
220| .
200| .
180| .
160|
140| *
120| *
100| ..
80| *
60| .
40| *
20| ..*...*
0|...*....*......*......*.....*.*....*...
-------------------------------------------------------------------
8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
"*" = data point, "." =
This graph is a linear plot of the number of Internet hosts
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
Number of Internet Hosts (logarithmic
| 1000000
| *.*
| ..*.*..*
| ...
| 100000 ..**
| *.*
H | ...*
o | .*
s | 10000 ..
t | ..
s | ....*
| ...*.*
1000| ...*..
| ...
| ...*
| ..*....*...
100|.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 9 9 9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2
"*" = data point, "." =
This graph is a logarithmic plot of the number of Internet hosts
N.2 Number of
This chart shows the number of domains existing in the
Domain Name System as collected by ZONE
Date
07/88 900
10/88 1,280
01/89 2,600
07/89 3,900
10/89 4,800
10/90 9,300
01/91 11,200
07/91 16,000
10/91 18,000
01/92 17,000
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
N.3 Distribution of IP Addresses per
This chart shows how many hosts have how many IP addresses.
data was collected on 1-Jan-92 and only the first 10 entries
shown
Addresses
1 715143
2 9015
3 1027
4 556
5 314
6 213
7 100
8 85
9 58
10 71
N.4 Distribution of Hosts by Top-level
This chart shows the number of hosts per top-level domain (top 40
only) on 1-Jan-92. The percentage listed is the increase since 1-
Oct-91. Large variations are probably due to problems and
in the collection process; these figures are not meant to
authoritative, but serve as reasonable estimates
243020 edu 13% 13011 fr 4% 1791 dk 4% 357 be -5%
181361 com 12% 12770 nl 21% 1662 es 15% 334 gr 14%
46463 gov 13% 12647 ch 10% 1506 kr 9% 308 br 26%
31622 au 19% 11994 fi 15% 1111 nz -16% 284 mx -5%
31016 de 20% 10228 no 9% 1016 tw n/a 207 is 0%
27492 mil 26% 8579 jp 6% 929 za n/a 146 pl 97%
27052 ca 22% 4109 net -49% 784 pt n/a 127 us 25%
19117 org 10% 3324 at 19% 484 sg 251% 25 tn 0%
18984 uk 139% 2719 it 197% 448 hk 78% 24 hu 71%
18473 se 34% 2020 il 14% 374 ie -7% 6 arpa 0%
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
N.5 Distribution of Hosts by Host
This chart shows the distribution of hosts by their host name on 1-
Jan-92. The host name is defined to be the first part of a
qualified domain name. Only the top 100 names are shown
384 venus 204 mac4 172 mac9 155 pollux 138
356 pluto 201 hobbes 172 mac11 155 frodo 136
323 mars 201 hermes 170 mac8 153 helios 135 pc
288 jupiter 198 thor 169 phoenix 152 mac17 135
286 saturn 198 sirius 169 mac12 151 vega 135
285 pc1 196 gw 169 hal 151 mac18 133
282 zeus 195 calvin 168 snoopy 150 falcon 131
262 iris 194 mac5 168 mac13 150 bach 131
260 mercury 191 mac10 167 mac15 146 castor 131
259 mac1 190 fred 167 mac14 145 sol 130
258 orion 189 titan 167 grumpy 145 dopey 128
254 mac2 189 pc3 163 gandalf 144 mac20 127 sun
240 newton 186 opus 162 pc4 144 mac19 127
234 neptune 186 mac6 160 uranus 142 spock 126 pc
233 pc2 185 charon 159 mac16 142 euler 125
224 gauss 185 apollo 158 sleepy 141 mickey 125
222 eagle 179 mac7 158 io 141 atlas 124
213 mac3 179 athena 157 earth 140 maxwell 123
209 merlin 177 alpha 156 europa 140 happy 123
207 cisco 172 mozart 155 rigel 140 doc 122 pc10
Future
ZONE currently runs on a DECsystem-20 and is written in assembler
The amount of data is quickly reaching the limits of the DEC-20
section address space, and the hardware's ability to survive
slimmer each day. ZONE assembles all its data in core before
it to disk. The implementation does this in order to be able
match host nicknames with official names before dumping complete
records. Sometimes a nickname can be in a different domain than
official name, complicating simpler methods
A new version of ZONE needs to be written to run on a modern
system. A completely new architecture should be designed to
the enormous amount of data collected and expected in the future
Data should be kept on disk so that a system crash will not wipe
days of collection. Multiple zone transfers could be occurring
parallel to reduce the time needed for data gathering. A new
might run continuously, cycling through the domain system on a
lasting weeks to a month, updating a local database with
collected for each domain. In this way, current statistics on
size of the Internet would always be known. The resulting
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RFC 1296 Internet Growth (1981-1991) January 1992
may also be useful for other network information services
RFC
Libes, D., "Choosing a Name for Your Computer", RFC 1178,
Systems Group/NIST, August 1990. (Also FYI 5.)
Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Implementation and Specification",
RFC 1035, USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.
Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - Concepts and Facilities", RFC 1034,
USC/Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.
Lazear, W., "MILNET Name Domain Transition", RFC 1031, Mitre
November 1987.
Harrenstien, K. Stahl, M., and J. Feinler, "DoD Internet Host
Specification", SRI, October 1985.
Postel, J., "Domain Name System Implementation Schedule - Revised",
RFC 921, USC/Information Sciences Institute, October 1984.
Security
Security issues are not discussed in this memo
Author's
Mark K.
SRI
Network Information Systems
333 Ravenswood Avenue, EJ282
Menlo Park, CA 94025
EMail: mkl@nisc.sri.
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