Network Solutions has been seeing increased traffic on whois in the last few months. The number of queries has approximately doubled each month since June. At this time, 40% of our inbound http traffic is whois related. In an attempt to alleviate some of the load on the servers, we have taken the following steps: - Some of the worst offenders (single site, large number of accesses) will be blocked from access starting this week - Replication of the whois data will be started earlier in the evening to allow for more timely updates - Existing whois hosts have had processor and memory upgrades - Local file storage is now being used vice NFS - Medium-term and long-term development efforts are underway to redesign whois for optimal performance. This includes in-memory searches, better parsing and dynamic updates obviating the need for large daily data movements. _____________________________________ David H. Holtzman (dholtz@internic.net) Sr Vice President of Engineering Network Solutions, Inc.