WHOIS is a service that many Internet users rely on daily – with around 200 queries a second, it’s a critical service to have available and responsive at all times. In a previous post I spoke about APNIC’s plans to distribute the WHOIS service around the globe, to improve responsiveness and to make the service more resilient in the face of localised disasters.
Since that post, the APNIC Infrastructure Services team have been working hard to answer the questions raised and construct a solution. As of the 10th of December, we have made a service change which places WHOIS query nodes in Tokyo, London, and California, as well as the set of nodes in Brisbane.
Our testing has shown responsiveness for WHOIS queries has dropped from around 400ms to around 30ms from various sites around the globe, depending on distance from the new query servers – a substantial gain in performance for users of the service.
We are also now using a DNS-based global traffic distribution mechanism that monitors the availability of each site and will direct traffic away from sites experiencing service disruptions, providing higher availability and resiliency.
As always, feedback on our services is welcome either as a comment here on the blog or through any of our other contact methods!
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