[73706] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: DNS Anycast as traffic optimizer?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Woodcock)
Wed Sep 1 14:14:30 2004
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:05:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>
To: Steve Francis <sfrancis@fastclick.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <41360F98.20808@fastclick.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Steve Francis wrote:
> I'm sure there is research out there...
Why? :-)
> ...how good/bad using DNS anycast is as a kludgey traffic optimiser?
I'd hardly call it a kludge. It's been standard best-practice for over a
decade.
> THe question is, what is that "some" relationship? 80% as good as
> Akamai? Terrible?
Should be much higher than Akamai, since that's not what they're
optimizing for. If you want nearest server, anycast will give you that
essentially 100% of the time. Akamai tries to get queries to servers that
have enough available capacity to handle the load. Since they're handling
bursty, high-bandwidth applications, rather than DNS.
-Bill
