On the use of anycast in DNS

We present the initial results from our evaluation study on the performance implications of anycast in DNS, using four anycast servers deployed at top-level DNS zones. Our results show that 15% to 55% of the queries sent to an anycast group, are answered by the topologically closest server and at least 10% of the queries experience an additional delay in the order of 100ms. While increased availability is one of the supposed advantages of anycast, we found that outages can last up to multiple minutes, mainly due to slow BGP convergence. On the other hand, the number of outages observed was fairly small, suggesting that anycast provides a generally stable service. Categories and Subject Descriptors: C.2.3[Computer Communications and Networks]: Network Operations - network management. General Terms: Measurement

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Sandeep Sarat, Vasileios Pappas, Andreas Terzis
• Keywords: Anycast, Performance Implications, SIGMETRICS 2005, Top-level Dns Zones