[the_ancient]

While I am sure the load is high, everytime you look up a .com you are not connecting to Verisign Server.

DNS does not work that way, Major DNS companies like RackSpace and AWS's Route 53 I suspect have higher load DNS than the Root Registries, and they offer the service for free...

[toast0]

> While I am sure the load is high, everytime you look up a .com you are not connecting to Verisign Server.

It depends on what's in your resolver cache. If coming from a cold cache, you would start from the root hints file[1] -- if you ask them for an A record for news.ycombinator.com, they give you the NS records for com. ([a-m].gtld-servers.net, and some A and AAAA records for those); these are the Verisign servers, then you ask one of those, and they tell you to go to amazon dns, then you ask amazon dns and they tell you it's a CNAME to cloudflare and you have to chase that down.

Next time you ask, hopefully, you'll have the delegations for com., ycombinator.com, and cloudflare.net. still in the cache; but if you have a small cache, or a large amount of diversity in domain names, you're still going to make a large number of requests to the Verisign servers; anyway the delegations are served with a 2 day TTL, so you'll need to come back periodically.

[1] ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root

[rms_returns]

> if you ask them for an A record for news.ycombinator.com, they give you the NS records for com.

Why does it have to go to the .com registry? Why can't the NS servers of the registrar (GoDaddy/Namecheap/etc.) themselves provide that resolution (ycombinator.com == xx.xx.xx.xx IP) ? After all the registrars are assigned for that specific purpose, aren't they?

Looks like a centralized bureaucracy to me if each request has to go to the root com/org/net DNS servers.