RE: [ga] No more FUD -- what is the current size of the .com database?

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

--- Paul Stahura <stahura@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> you also have to consider all the adds and deletes, besides the
> number
> changing name servers, so my guess is that is it in excess of 1%.
> Plus, I would guess that many add/dels do not happen evenly
> distributed
> across the day, but in bursts.

You're right. I was browsing http://www.dailychanges.com/ and the
number of absolute changes. For GoDaddy's nameservers
(secureserver.net) the number of absolute changes (i.e. sum of the
absolute value of each of new/delete/in/out)  is approximately 0.3% for
a single day. For 1and1.com it's 0.2%.  For eNom (name-services.com),
it's around 0.9%. 

But, for several of the drop catchers or domain tasters, the turnovers
are in excess of 100% per day. In a sense, they're doing free
capacity/stress testing for VeriSign. :) WIthout domain tasting, I
think we'd be below 1%.

But, even if one is off by an order of magnitude, e.g. if the real
number is 10% per day in terms of overall changes (instead of 1%),
that's still a couple of Gigabytes/day at most (and we're assuming zero
compression ---- if there are spikes, I bet the compression on those
would be huge, since it's a bunch of domains being added or deleted
to/from the same set of nameservers). A moderately active website (e.g.
Alexa rating of 10,000 to 50,000) will do 10+ GB/day in traffic. Not
huge. One has to multiply that by the number of datacenters VeriSign
has, but it's still not enormous (one assumes they need to send only a
single update to each datacenter across the internet, and then that
gets internally mirrored within each datacenter at LAN speeds). 

Maybe one of the public non-profit registry operators (if they read
this list) can give some stats, and then one can extrapolate their
numbers.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.kirikos.com/