Re: [dmarc-ietf] Doing a tree walk rather than PSL lookup

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

On Tue 24/Nov/2020 18:03:51 +0100 John Levine wrote:
> In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>>> One of the points of the tree walk is to get rid of the PSL processing.
>>
>> The PSL processing is a local lookup on an in-memory suffix tree.  How is it a 
>> progress to replace it with a tree walk?  A PSL search is lightning faster than 
>> even a single DNS lookup, isn't it?
> 
> You have to download a copy of the PSL, read it into your program, and
> parse it into some internal form. The PSL is over 200K of text and
> 13,000 lines, so while it's not a large file, it's not zero either.


Right.  The optimal solution would be to load the list and the lookup algorithm 
as a shared object.  Currently, my filter has its private copy of it.  But then 
I don't reload the filter so often that parsing the file is noticeable.  To 
wit, loading the virus database takes much much longer.


> If you're lucky you can amortize your PSL parsing across multiple
> DMARC checks, but your DNS cache amortizes DNS lookups across multiple
> checks, too.


I doubt I'd get comparable efficiency, even if my mail server has a dedicated 
caching resolver.  Mail servers that rely on stub resolvers would experience a 
noticeable degradation.


> The DNS approach has the advantage that you don't have to depend on a
> third party's text file updated at unknown intervals,


Agreed.


> and also makes it easier to deal with what I've called the Holy Roman Empire
> problem.


Uh?  The Holy Roman Empire became a disconnected tree soon after Charlemagne's 
death, so that looks like some of the dystopic scenarios that ISOC conceived a 
few years ago.  Not sure what you mean.


Best
Ale
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