rfc1296.txt

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Network Working Group                                          M. Lottor
Request for Comments: 1296                             SRI International
                                      Network Information Systems Center
                                                            January 1992


                      Internet Growth (1981-1991)

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard.  Distribution of this memo is
   unlimited.

Abstract

   This document illustrates the growth of the Internet by examination
   of entries in the Domain Name System (DNS) and pre-DNS host tables.
   DNS entries are collected by a program called ZONE, which searches
   the Internet and retrieves data from all known domains.  Pre-DNS host
   table data were retrieved from system archive tapes.  Various
   statistics are presented on the number of hosts and domains.

Table of Contents

   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

Introduction

   This document provides statistics on the growth of the Internet by
   examining the number of Internet hosts and domains over a 10-year
   period.  Before the Domain Name System was established, practically
   all hosts on the Internet were registered with the Network
   Information Center (SRI-NIC) and entries were placed in the Official
   Host Table for each one.  Data on the number of hosts for pre-DNS



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RFC 1296              Internet Growth (1981-1991)           January 1992


   years comes from copies of the host table at selected times.  The DNS
   system was introduced around 1984 but took almost 4 years before it
   was fully implemented on the Internet.  However, by this time many
   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-DNS
   transition period.  ZONE would "walk" the DNS tree and build a host
   table of all the information it collected.  This host table could
   then be used by sites that had not yet made the DNS transition.
   However, ZONE was never used for this purpose.  Instead, it was found
   to be useful for collecting statistics on the size of the domain
   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 DNS
   protocol.  ZONE has been used in varying ways ever since to collect
   this information.  In the first few years, it was used to produce a
   wall-size chart of the domain tree.  However, the number of domains
   quickly outgrew the size of the wall and the charts were abandoned.
   In later years, statistics on the number of hosts and domains were
   extracted from the resulting host table, sometimes categorizing data
   based on top-level domain names or on computer system type or
   manufacturer.

   The time to gather the data also grew from hours to a week, and the
   size of the host table produced soon reached 50 megabytes.  In order
   to reduce the amount of data collected, ZONE is now run in a mode
   collecting only host names and IP addresses, ignoring protocol, host
   information and MX record data.  The host table is then groveled over
   by some utilities (such as sort, uniq and grep) to produce the
   statistics required.  ZONE is currently run every 3 months at SRI.

How ZONE Works

   ZONE maintains a list of domains and their servers and a flag
   indicating whether information for a domain has been successfully
   loaded from one of the servers. Because of another bug in BIND, ZONE
   must be primed with a list of all the top-level domains and their
   name servers.  It then cycles through the domain list, attempting to
   contact one of the servers for each domain not yet transferred.  When
   a server is contacted (via TCP), a Start of Authority (SOA) query is
   first sent to make sure the server is authoritative for the domain
   being requested.  If so, then a zone transfer query (AXFR) is sent to
   request all the resource records for the domain to be retrieved.

   When a name server record (NS) is received, the referenced domain and



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   server are added to the list of domains to process.  When host
   records (A, CNAME, HINFO, MX) are received, they are added to an in-
   core table of host information.  The program ends when it has cycled
   through the entire list of domains without receiving any new
   information.  It then dumps the table of host information to a
   HOSTS.TXT format file.

Problems with Data Collection

   For various reasons, some Internet sites do not allow zone transfers
   of their domain servers.  ZONE also eventually gives up trying to
   transfer a domain after too many failures.  The number of domains
   that could not be zone transferred during the 1-Jan-92 ZONE run was
   around 800 out of 17,000.  Additionally, it is assumed that not all
   hosts on the Internet are registered in a domain server.  These
   problems cause the statistics gathered by ZONE to be lower than the
   actual amounts.

   Manual review of some of the data collected by ZONE also shows a lot
   of random entries in the DNS.  Misformatted entries may cause bogus
   server or host records to appear.  Many times a server is found to
   not be authoritative for the domain listed.  Sometimes entire domains
   are renamed and their old entries left in place for a transition
   period, thus causing each host within that domain to be counted
   twice.  These problems cause the results of ZONE to be higher than
   the actual amounts.

   Manual scanning of the data indicates that the additional entries are
   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.  Downloading
   domain information from every domain on the Internet generates a
   large amount of network traffic.  It also puts an extra CPU load on
   each domain server it must contact.  An organized effort might be
   considered to have only one such program doing this on the Internet
   at regularly scheduled intervals to keep the problem of multiple data
   collectors from occurring.

Scope of the Study

   A problem with counting hosts and domains on the Internet is defining
   what the Internet really is.  Finding host entries in the DNS does
   not necessarily indicate that the host is reachable from the
   Internet.  Many companies have mail gateways between the Internet and
   their local nets, thus disallowing direct access.  However, some of
   these companies advertise all their hosts, and some advertise only



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   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 domains
   really part of the Internet and should they be counted in an Internet
   size study?

   For the purposes of this study, a host has been defined as a
   [name(s),IP-address(es)] grouping discovered from the DNS.  This
   prevents us from counting a host with multiple names or addresses
   more than once.  However, this does not consider whether the host is
   directly accessible or not.  When ZONE counts the number of domains
   it includes all domains referenced by an NS record in the DNS, thus
   including MX-only domain sites in the final results.

N. Results

   This section presents data from archive tapes of SRI-NIC from 1981 to
   1986, and statistics gathered by runs of ZONE from 1986 to 1992.

N.1 Number of Internet Hosts

   The chart below shows the number of IP hosts on the Internet.  These
   are hosts with at least one IP address assigned.  Data was collected
   by ZONE except where noted.  The following two sections are graphs of
   the data in this chart.

        Date             Hosts

        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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                        Number of Internet Hosts (linear)
800|
780|
760|
740|                                                                  *
720|
700|
680|                                                                 .
660|
640|
620|
600| T                                                              *
580| h
560| o
540| u
520| s                                                             *
500| a
480| n                                                            .
460| d
440| s
420|                                                             .
400| o
380| f
360|                                                            *