NAVYJOBS.COM

Tue Apr 23 14:59:23 UTC 1996

> Maybe instead of:
> 
>         <whatever>.COM being considered as three
>         tokens and being looked up as:
>                 ask a ROOT nameserver for COM NSes
>                 ask a COM nameserver for <whatever> NSes
>                 ask a <whatever> nameserver for appropriate info
>                 (all modulo caching)
>         instead we treat it as (leaving out the '<' '>' stuff out of laziness):
> 
>                 <w><h><a><t><e><v><e><r><.><c><o><m>
>         and look up like this:
>                 ask a ROOT nameserver for M NSes
>                 ask a M nameserver for O NSes
>                 ...
>                 ask a <w> nameserver for appropriate info
> that will scale to a huge number of generally
> unformatted labels for things.
> 

And, unfortunately, scale to taking huge numbers of seconds for stuff that
isn't already cached. I just queried a bunch of sites and got times from .1s
to 8s for 3-lookup queries. While I'm willing to wait for 10 seconds for
a return, I'm not sure I'd be willing to wait 1.5 minutes. People have
this perception that the net should go fast (unfortunately even when they're
dialed up with 2400bd modems :-). This'll be a win for a.com, but a real
lose for CompuServe.com :-). 

...arun
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Welch					5000 Arlington Centre Blvd
Lead Software Engineer				Columbus, OH 43220
CompuServe					awelch at csi.compuserve.com