At 1/5/02 10:34 AM, Joseph McDonald wrote: >YES! I believe Tucows proposed a very similar idea to Verisign: >Right now, if you do a "check" command on a domain, and you are not >the registrar for that domain, you receive an error message, otherwise >you get the expiration date. The proposal was to have the check >command return the expiration date regardless of who was the >registrar. This would eliminate *huge* number of check/add commands and >largely solve the problem, just as your IN_THE_LAST_24_HOURS flag >would. Either one is fine by me. > >There was another proposal which would also take a huge load off of >the registry: The top registrars do millions of check commands against >the registry on a daily basis to support normal operations. On average >there are less than 50K adds and 50K drops performed at the registry >each day. Let's say the top 4 registrars each do 2.5 million checks a >day (my guess is that this is a conservative number) for a total of 10 >million checks a day. The idea is that the registry can push those >100K changes out to the registrars, thus saving 9.6 *million* >transactions a day, which is more than 100 per second, and when you >figure in the peaks, you may be talking 200 per second during busy >times.
These are excellent suggestions. But just to play devil's advocate: even with these good ideas implemented, don't you think that demand will again grow to fill all the registry connections (and then some)? For example, let's say that right now there are 200 checks a second at peak, and that's because people are trying to get 50,000 valuable domains they think might drop. Now let's say some sort of communication method is established such that people can tell in advance 49,000 of them aren't actually going to expire. Why wouldn't there still be 200 checks a second for the remaining 1,000 names? There's no reason I can see that a single domain couldn't get 200 checks a second; for any reasonably valuable domain name, there are least 200 people worldwide who have the ability and desire to do one lookup a second or more on it. I suspect the peaks are 200 a second (or whatever) not because that's the limit of the demand, but because the system stops working beyond that, so you never see any higher demands reported. But the potential connection demand might be 1,000 times what you've seen; I doubt "speculators" (however defined) are going to let any connections sit idle, even if they only want one domain instead of 100. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
