Distributed hash table (DHT) systems are an important class of peer-to-peer routing infrastructures. They enable scalable wide-area storage and retrieval of information, and will support the rapid development of a wide variety of Internet-scale applications ranging from naming systems and file systems to application-layer multicast. DHT systems essentially build an overlay network, but a path on the overlay between any two nodes can be significantly different from the unicast path between those two nodes on the underlying network. As such, the lookup latency in these systems can be quite high and can adversely impact the performance of applications built on top of such systems. In this paper, we discuss a random sampling technique that incrementally improves lookup latency in DHT systems. Our sampling can be implemented using information gleaned from lookups traversing the overlay network. For this reason, we call our approach lookup-parasitic random sampling (LPRS). LPRS is fast, i...