Critter - 9:09 pm on May 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

Actually Merlin there are some errors in your Google DNS assumption.

First of all Google's DNS servers only return *one* IP address to an 'A' record request. This has a TTL (time-to-live) of 15 minutes--so multiple requests for 'www.google.com' will return the *same* IP address for 15 minutes because of DNS cacheing on the user side. The IP address returned will be a random one and will represent one of the nine datacenters' public IP addresses. This method is different than, say, yahoo, which gives out *multiple* IP addresses for a given query and allows the end user or a DNS cache on the user's network to choose one of the IPs that have been returned at random.

When you then access the datacenter associated with that IP address you may get differing results with each request because each datacenter has load balancing going on (which has nothing to do with DNS). One will (probably) access a different machine at that datacenter with each request.

Peter

P.S. There are now 7 of the 9 datacenters showing the "new" index.