Michael Braunöder michael.braunoeder@nic.at - Alexander Mayrhofer alexander.mayrhofer@nic.at

The software contained in this repository was developed to calculate DNS Magnitude values from traffic data of the ICANN Managed Root Server (IMRS, also known as "L-Root") on a per-TLD basis.

DNS Magnitude is a logarithmic measure for the DNS popularity of a domain name, based on counting unique client addresses, normalized to the 0-10 range.

The calculation software exists in two variants, one developed using shell scripting techniques (see script-based directory), and one developed in Python, using HyperLogLog (HLL) probabilistic data structures (see hll-based directory). The reason for this is that initially, we expected to encounter a massive number of unique IP addresses, and a limited number of TLDs, where an HLL-based approach would have been more advantegous. However, in practice, the number of unique client IP addresses is surprisingly low, while the number of TLDs is massive. This property makes a precise, script-based approach feasible.

HLLs are probabilistic, therefore a certain margin of error is introduced in calculations. On the other hand, the script-based approach does not introduce any margin of error, because it does not make use of a probabilistic data structure.

For the use case of calculating the DNS Magnitude of TLDs based on root-level traffic, the script-based software is therefore recommended.

More information on the two variants is found in the README of the respective subdirectories.

Licensing information can be found in LICENSE, changes are tracked in CHANGES