3 ms·
It sounds like you're thinking of zone transfers (the special AXFR query type). In that case the server's response may consist of more than one DNS message sent
by matttpt 5y ago
It sounds like you're thinking of zone transfers (the special AXFR query type). In that case the server's response may consist of more than one DNS message sent consecutively over a single TCP connection [1], so it's possible to transfer large zones. E.g. out of curiosity I just asked for the root zone with
dig . axfr @iad.xfr.dns.icann.org
and I received 24,448 records transferred over 83 DNS messages, according to the stats dig prints at the end.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5936#section-2.2 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5936#section-2.2