arstechnica.com — Google wants to update the DNS protocol so everyone can see at least part of a client's IP address in order to connect it to the closest server. The idea is to keep latency to a minimum by preventing cross-continent connections when possible.
Jan 28, 2010 View in Crawl 4
submethodJan 28, 2010
Seems a bit excessive. You don't need DNS to tell you geographic location.
Closed AccountJan 29, 2010
Haha sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous.
cramdJan 29, 2010
I think this could improve performance much more than "marginally". With many pages now having 100+ HTTP resources, being able to reduce the latency can have a major impact. Lets say that the current latency for user "a" is 100ms and they are requesting a page with 100 resources on it. Lets also assume that their browser's connection currency is defaulted at 2. This means 50 round trips at 100ms. With the proposed changes to DNS, and assuming that the site the user is requesting has a closer server we could cut the latency down to say 35ms. Now we are looking at 35ms * 50 round trips. This adds up quickly.
Closed AccountJan 29, 2010
Not at all. A CDN ensures that content is delivered from a local host no matter what the domain is. Akamai is an excellent example of a CDN. Here's a quick example for you:Go to www.microsoft.com and view the source of that page. Look for an HTML tag for an image. You'll find that they host their images at the domain i.microsoft.com. Do a lookup of i.microsoft.com and you'll find it's actually an alias pointing to a1475.g.akamai.net, and that it resolves to one or more different IP's:$ host i.microsoft.comi.microsoft.com is an alias for i.toggle.www.ms.akadns.net.i.toggle.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for i.g.www.ms.akadns.net.i.g.www.ms.akadns.net is an alias for i.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net.i.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1475.g.akamai.net.a1475.g.akamai.net has address 209.107.209.32a1475.g.akamai.net has address 209.107.209.64But if you do the same thing you'll likely find that i.microsoft.com resolves to a completely different IP (or set of IP's) than what it did for me. Depending on where you're located you might find it resolves to one of 100+ different IP's because Akamai is able to figure out where you're connecting from and direct you to a caching server located very close to you (close in terms of network hops, not necessarily physically close). So even though both you and I get the main html document from www.microsoft.com, your browser will download images for that page from a server close to you and I'll download images from a server close to me. It saves a lot of overhead since we're not both trying to download images and other objects all from www.microsoft.com.With what Google proposes, if I ran a small website called foo.com then I could do a "poor mans" version of what Akamai does by simply setting up a server in the USA, a server in the UK, a server in Japan, etc. for all my "heavy" data like images, videos, and other content. On www.foo.com I would have my image tags and other content point to a domain like images.foo.com. I would then have images.foo.com resolve to the US server for folks in the US, to the UK server for folks in Europe, and the Japan server for folks in Asia. One html page that I need to modify and yet thanks to DNS it would download images, videos, and other network-intensive data from a host close to you rather than from half way around the world.TLD's like .com, .uk, etc. don't allow you to do this sort of thing.
cyrusunccJan 30, 2010
facepalm
Closed AccountJan 30, 2010
Google wants to essentially replace the function of a router to reduce traffic latency only to be made up in the latency of the query. Doesn't make much sense. Not to mention completely changing routing protocols.