After the deployment of the new nameservers - amongst other places in Tokio and two locations in the US - the response times for nameserver requests for .de domains have decreased dramatically. Internet users in Asia, North America and the Pacific area benefit most, as measurements by the Japanese domain registry JPRS and DENIC show. Where Internet users from Japan, Corea, China or Australia previously had to wait about 300 milliseconds for the answer from a DENIC nameserver, they now are served in less than half that time. The largest decrease happened in Japan from about 270 down to 5 milliseconds. Also, requests for .de domain data from the USA are now served faster by way of the two new servers on the West and East coast. The response times went down from 170 to 70 milliseconds.

In Europe coverage was very good already, but could be improved even more through deployment of more nameservers. The additional server in London, for example, led to a 50% decrease in response times to about 25 milliseconds.

Background: Nameservers

Nameservers make sure that an Internet service is reachable, because they store the mapping between domains and their respective numerical IP addresses. The central nameserver for all .de-domains is operated by DENIC eG in Frankfurt. Copies of its data are stored on several secondary nameservers in Frankfurt, Karlsruhe, Dortmund, Stuttgart, London, Wien, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Tokio, Elmsford, NY und San Jose, CA. Their worldwide distribution means that information is readily accessible everywhere and that a failure of a certain machine does not lead to larger delays.

In peak hours every single server answers 20,000 and more requests per minute. The daily total is more than 100 million requests.

Images:

A map with all locations of the nameservers for the .de zone

A graphical analysis of comparative data before and after deployment of the new servers