Saturday, January 05, 2002, 3:30:17 PM, you wrote:
RLM> actually going to expire. Why wouldn't there still be 200 checks a second RLM> for the remaining 1,000 names? There's no reason I can see that a single RLM> domain couldn't get 200 checks a second; for any reasonably valuable RLM> domain name, there are least 200 people worldwide who have the ability RLM> and desire to do one lookup a second or more on it. You will still see a load during the drop window. Registrars will use their connections to get the names that their customers desire, but the load will be much less than it is now. The reason it will be lower is that they will stop checking once the determine that the name has been given to someone else. For example, let's say that everyone *thinks* that coolname.com is going to drop within the next 3 days. So they fire up their connections and they each pound the registry with 100 check or add commands a second for the entire "drop window" (which is can be around 2 hours -- not the 15 minutes verisign says). Now, if they get the expiration date when they do a check or add, they can cease hammering for that name. Let's say the name drops 5 minutes into the drop window, you have just saved 100 checks per second * 1hour 45 minutes of checks. So instead of doing 720,000 checks you do 30,000. And since the day of the drop is posted, instead of doing this for 3 days (2.1 million checks), you do it only on the day it is dropped and only until it is snapped up, not one second more. Also, the above scenario is only for 1 registrar, multiply that by the number of registrars that are currently attempting to get the dropped names. And I know some registrars are doing in excess of 100 checks per second. So yes, there will be a load on the registry, but it will be much less severe, and much more efficient, and even, dare I say, more fair. The reason it adds a bit of fairness is that the guy that *got* coolname.com knows he should stop trying to get it, no one else knows that. So now he can go on to try and get almostcoolname.com while all the other poor slobs are still wasting their time in a vain attempt to secure coolname.com regards, -joe
