On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 12:24:35PM -0400, Edward Lewis wrote: > To me the question is the accuracy of the following statement in the > article, not the precise numbers themselves: > > "One would imagine that if all things were equal, the distribution > of root servers should mirror the distribution of Internet users." > > That sentence seems nice on the surface, but I don't think it is > true. As another poster notes:
That does seem to go to the heart of the matter. > neither)? Perhaps a root server can handle 30M people's needs. This highlights an important and interesting question, however. I am not an advocate of a strong one-boss-to-rule-them-all model of root zone operations. On the root-servers.org site, however (which seems to be the source of at least some of the data pingdom is using), there isn't anywhere one can find a description of how sites are chosen by the various operators nor what factors determine provisioning in those sites. Let me make up an implausiblr scenario to illustrate why this might matter, and how additional coverage could in principle get worse by adding more nodes (an issue not clear in the pingdom article). Suppose that in Viet Nam there is an IX, that most of the ISPs in Viet Nam have a presence in that IX, and that all the pariticpans in the IX have free and easy peering policies. Suppose also that the ISPs in that IX all have extremely good connections to Singapore and Malaysia. As a result of all of this, ISPs all have extremely good connectivity to F, I, and J. Suppose L puts a node in the Vietnamese IX. Service is improved in the sense that RTT on root queries goes down when they're directed to L. However, if L accidentally puts an underprovisioned node in Viet Nam, and it is sometimes overwhelmed, then service actually gets _worse_: the overwhelmed node sometimes drops queries or crashes or traffic gets routed elsewhere; in any case, there is additional latency that results from having to recover from the overload condition. This kind of worry (and I want to emphasise I don't share it; I'm just pointing out that people who like to worry about this sort of thing have an argument) could be addressed by various server operators providing outlines of how they select sites, what their provisioning assumptions are, and so on. Best, A -- Andrew Sullivan a...@anvilwalrusden.com _______________________________________________ dns-operations mailing list dns-operations@lists.dns-oarc.net https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-operations dns-jobs mailing list https://lists.dns-oarc.net/mailman/listinfo/dns-jobs
