At 4/4/01 2:00 PM, OpenSRS wrote:
>Then why does our "primary" nameserver get 5-10 times as many requests
>from the outside as our "secondary"?
Because it's "faster" for 80-90% of resolvers doing lookups on your
domain. Perhaps it's on a generally faster connection, or it's
topologically closer to AOL's resolvers, etc.
The first time a resolver does a query for your domain, it chooses one of
your nameservers *at random*, and remembers how long it took to answer.
For the second query, it tries the other nameserver, then remembers how
long that one took.
The third and subsequent queries use whichever nameserver was faster to
respond. If the "primary" was faster, subsequent queries are directed to
the "primary"; if the "secondary" was faster, they'll be directed to the
"secondary". (Again, these terms are misleading; the resolver has no
knowledge of which one you're calling the "primary" and "secondary".)
As I said, this is a simplified explanation; the link I included has more
details:
http://www.acmebw.com/askmrdns/archive.php?question=3
In any case, the point is that it has nothing to do with the fact that
it's listed as the "primary" in WHOIS. If you reversed the order of your
name servers, making the "primary" the "secondary" and vice versa, you'd
find that the one that currently gets the most load would continue to get
the most load, even though it would then be the "secondary".
--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
