Variance in www, www2, www3 due to DNS expire time?

Logs show referrers from www when I only see page in www2

[espeed]

I wrote a program to monitor my Web traffic from a Unix terminal, and I am noticing an increase in referrals from www.google.com. I tried one of the www.google.com referral links in my browser, but the page didn't come up. I then tried it on www2 and the page was listed as number three.

Once we notice changes on www2 and www3, is it just a waiting game for the www.google.com's DNS entry to expire? (i.e. is it that my DNS hasn't updated, but my user's has?)

[ViruS]

DNS expires in 5 minutes AFAIK... the question is wherether next DNS request will point you to a datacenter that with new database or not.

[espeed]

I guess I could have looked this up...

[root@roam root]# nslookup
> set type=soa
> google.com
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
google.com
origin = ns1.google.com
mail addr = dns-admin.google.com
serial = 2002103114
refresh = 7200
retry = 1800
expire = 1038800
minimum = 60

[Slud]

There's an mp3 recording from a Linux conference of one of (the head?) Google techs talking about the backend. I think there's a bit where he describes some of the DNS based load balancing they do. Very short TTL's on those domain names.

[GoogleGuy]

Just be patient, espeed. In a few days the switchover will be complete and this will be a moot point. :) Seriously, it takes us a while to switch all those terabytes of data from the old index to the new index. You can hit either index depending on a lot of factors.