Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Steve Francis wrote:
I'm sure there is research out there...
Why? :-)
Usual - if I build it myself, will it work well enough, or should I pony up for a CDN?
...how good/bad using DNS anycast is as a kludgey traffic optimiser?
I'd hardly call it a kludge. It's been standard best-practice for over a decade.
I thought it was standard best practice for availability, like for root name servers. I thought it was not a good "closest server" selection mechanism, as you'll be going to the closest server as determined by BGP - which may have little relationship to the server with lowest RTT. It'd be nice to see some metrics wither way....
THe question is, what is that "some" relationship? 80% as good as Akamai? Terrible?
Should be much higher than Akamai, since that's not what they're optimizing for. If you want nearest server, anycast will give you that essentially 100% of the time. Akamai tries to get queries to servers that have enough available capacity to handle the load. Since they're handling bursty, high-bandwidth applications, rather than DNS.
-Bill