Hello Dan,
I'm looking for information on how and/or when ANS takes updated information from the IRR databases (RADB in this case) and applies them internally.
The short answer is I do not know. I have cc'd the ans folks and I'm sure they can give a definitive answer. However, I do have some information since we administer the *public* ans database. Updates are applied immediately to the public ans database. Updates can take up to a maximum of 15 minutes to show up on our production whois.ra.net server, which mirrors the public ans database. I am using the word 'public' to indicate that ANS keeps it's own internal DB which to my knowledge is not publically viewable. What differences there are between the public ans DB and it's internal counterpart, and how ans factors the radb DB into the equation I am unsure of.
It appears that very few nets rely on the data in the RADB, or take updated data from the RADB in near-real-time fashion.
This is an open question and obviously there are those who do not use the IRR. However, our production whois server handles ~25,000 TCP connections and 250,000 queries per day on average. We would like to see these numbers increase as we continue to try and improve the IRR environment. I'd be interested in hearing how you came to your conclusion. regards, --jerry (Merit)