Update 2010-12-25: AWS techs informed me that Route 53 is designed with a balance between latency and availability hence why not all name servers go to the nearest data center like I was expecting. Another AWS tech informed me that DNS resolvers utilize various performance techniques such as issuing parallel queries and remembering which nameserver responded fastest. Although I do not know of any resolvers that actually implement these techniques, and the AWS tech has yet to respond, I think this is a solid decision for Route 53 and the tests following are an example of that.
I ran a few tests from some of the datacenters I have servers in (should’ve ran some tests from the East coast..). They don’t impress me that much and raise a concern for when Route 53 adds location-aware results because I sure don’t want to send Northern California users all the way to the Europe (Ireland) region. Hopefully they’re working out these kinks although this is a routing level issue and possibly out of their control.
Here are the results based on the a rob.olmos.name hosted zone:
Assigned:
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org
ns-77.awsdns-09.com
ns-937.awsdns-53.net
Ping from Torrance, CA (Covad):
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 72ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org 7ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 40ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net 7ms
Only two using LA datacenter..
Ping from Torrance, CA (Verizon FiOS):
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 80ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org 12ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 49ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net 12ms
Only two using LA datacenter…
Ping from LA datacenter:
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 67ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org <1ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 30ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net <1ms
Not all using the LA datacenter…
Ping from DFW Rackspace datacenter:
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 30ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org 2ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 59ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net 36ms
Only one using the DFW datacenter?
Ping from Chicago Rackspace datacenter:
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 23ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org 23ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 7ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net 34ms
Only one using the St. Louis datacenter
Ping from EC2 West A:
ns-1860.awsdns-40.co.uk 150ms
ns-1206.awsdns-22.org 150ms
ns-77.awsdns-09.com 21ms
ns-937.awsdns-53.net 21ms
Two of them going to Germany from Northern California???
Sample dig queries return similar response times.
Great to read this post. We want to implement this on our website http://www.magicofflight.com. But we do not know how to update our name servers. Please reply.