> Hi everyone. I just signed up to this list and thought to introduce > myself.
Welcome to the community! We're a pretty friendly bunch here. Hasn't been any blood drawn in quite a while, honestly. :) With respect to delays in the keyserver network, the major address that people tend to use (pool.sks-keyservers.net) is not a single box but a confederation of them. It's sort of like how when you visit google.com you're visiting one of thousands of boxes configured to respond to that address. If by some chance you and your correspondent happen to hit the exact same keyserver the propagation delay will be measured in milliseconds. Otherwise the certificate has to be propagated from one machine's database to another. This process, while normally very quick (sub-minute), sometimes has problems. Imagine there's Box A and Box B and then the Big Cloud of Boxes that represents the keyserver network. A gets all its updates from B, and B gets its updates from the Big Cloud of Boxes. If for some reason the network link from A to B goes down, A will fall behind B (and the rest of the Big Cloud of Boxes) in synchronization. The good news is that most of the time propagation speed is extremely fast. Network problems do occur, but generally they're not significant enough to be a major worry.
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