Quote Originally Posted by iaskwhy
Again, this has nothing to do with NetSol or GoDadday or any other registrar. It has to do with how fast a domain can now propogate. And by that, I mean that there were 6, probably more now, "Nodes" situated around the world. They all had the exact same data for every domain registered on the WWW from ICANN.

It use to take 48 to 72 hours for all the nodes to get and update the data. In the mean time, from whereever your sitting, your domain may be up one minute and down the next, depending on what node your http packets were routed theough at that particular instant of time. Since packets are broadcast like dandolion seeds, they can go around the planet and come in through your back door, or they may come more direct, but all of them go through at least one node before they get to you. So if all the nodes don't have the same exact address for your domain, the data doesn't come through until all nodes have updated. That use to take 3 days, now it can take just hours. And that's the "Holey Moley That Was Fast" part.
Oh boy.

1) There's been 13 root .com servers for quite some time.

2) It used to take 24-72, with most ISPs in the US seeing it within 24, and most users in Africa and Asia catching up within 72.

3) The root servers will all have the same copy of the zone at the same time. They MUST. The zone itself may not be updated immediately, but all of the serial numbers on any given .com root will be in sync at any given time.

4) If your domain was going up-and-down, your ISP has horrible DNS practices, but it has nothing at all to do with the path your packets were taking to the server - packets aren't broadcast like seeds, they take a very specific route based on advertisements of locations. You will look up the IP address of the domain once by querying your ISP's DNS cluster. The Cluster will look up the domain once by querying the root servers for an authoritative nameserver, and then by querying the list of authoritative nameservers until the first replies with an answer. That answer will be returned to you, and your browser will make a connection to that server using standard internet routing - a single packet is sent, and it is directed in a single path to a single server

For 99% of the sites on the internet, my quick summary is correct-enough for general understanding - the network operators among us will know that some intricacies of DNS such as glue records, and more advanced techniques like ANYCAST and MULTICAST make my comment a lie, but the number of sites doing ANYCAST and location based DNS balancing are in the HUGE minority. It'd take much more than a page to explain the concept of ANYCAST, but anyone who's interested can go read the F-ROOT homepage ( http://www.isc.org/ops/f-root/ ) or, perhaps, the Akamai website.