4 ms·

I'm just asking you to do the test, because it was forced on me for 6 months of my life :) Firstly, cr.yp.to is hosted on some really basic consumer grade hard

I'm just asking you to do the test, because it was forced on me for 6 months of my life :) Firstly, cr.yp.to is hosted on some really basic consumer grade hardware most likely and has to make an additional hop through Tonga of all places for DNS resolution. Of course, the page size of cr.yp.to is very small and does not involve any other communication with other servers to deliver a request. But Google has x million machines, x million miles of fiber, x million sticks of ram, and the page size on google also isn't terribly huge. And it's serving a cached result usually, the robot has already scraped it. But still, because of the number of network pings that serving a single google search takes, it is extremely common on cell phones to lose service for a millisecond and completely destroy the bidirectional connection between you and Google, and your mobile browser will just sit there hanging forever until you force restart it.

jkaptur 6y ago
Does using the .to TLD really imply that the request has to make a hop through Tonga? I'm not a DNS expert, but that doesn't sound right. (I ask as the owner of a .so site...)
- sushshshsh 6y ago
  I also am not an expert, but Dan J Bernstein (the owner of cr.yp.to) states that his website --- er actually hold on, I think I misremembered the story from his site. Let me paste it here: 2000-11-16: The .to administrators destroy yp.to for reasons that have never been explained. See more here: https://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html https://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html
  - codegladiator 6y ago
    That's quite an interesting page. They had a recent outage after 3 years > 2017.07.24 roughly 21:50 to 22:10: Unexplained network outage at UIC. > 2020.04.20 roughly noon GMT: Power outage at UIC.
    - sushshshsh 6y ago
      Hehe, UIC is the bane of cr.yp.to's existence, between network and power instability... Makes you appreciate what the big cloud players abstract away from us!
- yabones 6y ago
  Short answer, No... Long answer, 'sort of'. DJB uses a custom nameserver for DNS, so only one of the lookups would have to go through Tonga. The web request wouldn't leave the US (assuming that's where you are). It goes sort of like this: 1. You query 'cr.yp.to' which your DNS server will either have cached, or make a recursive query to '.' (root DNS), then to '.to.' The '.to.' server will have nameserver information for 'yp.to.' which gets queried next. 2. The nameserver for 'yp.to' is looked up. In this case, it's `uz5jmyqz3gz2bhnuzg0rr0cml9u8pntyhn2jhtqn04yt3sm5h235c1.yp.to.' 3. The A records for that NS record are '131.193.32.109' and '131.193.32.108', both of which belong to an IPv4 block owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago. 4. Your computer queries the A record(s) for the subdomain, 'cr.yp.to.' from the nameserver for 'yp.to.' which in this case points to the same two IPs as the nameserver. 5. Depending on your OS/Browser, you will make an HTTP or HTTPS connection with that server and begin to download site content. So, no you don't "make a hop" through Tonga, but the '.to.' nameserver will receive a request (if it's not cached by your resolver) to resolve the 'yp.to.' server.
codegladiator 6y ago
> But Google has x million machines That's because google has that amount of traffic. I am sure a hn hug would take the cypto site down.

jkaptur 6y ago

Does using the .to TLD really imply that the request has to make a hop through Tonga? I'm not a DNS expert, but that doesn't sound right. (I ask as the owner of a .so site...)

sushshshsh 6y ago
I also am not an expert, but Dan J Bernstein (the owner of cr.yp.to) states that his website --- er actually hold on, I think I misremembered the story from his site. Let me paste it here: 2000-11-16: The .to administrators destroy yp.to for reasons that have never been explained. See more here: https://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html https://cr.yp.to/serverinfo.html
- codegladiator 6y ago
  That's quite an interesting page. They had a recent outage after 3 years > 2017.07.24 roughly 21:50 to 22:10: Unexplained network outage at UIC. > 2020.04.20 roughly noon GMT: Power outage at UIC.
  - sushshshsh 6y ago
    Hehe, UIC is the bane of cr.yp.to's existence, between network and power instability... Makes you appreciate what the big cloud players abstract away from us!
yabones 6y ago
Short answer, No... Long answer, 'sort of'. DJB uses a custom nameserver for DNS, so only one of the lookups would have to go through Tonga. The web request wouldn't leave the US (assuming that's where you are). It goes sort of like this: 1. You query 'cr.yp.to' which your DNS server will either have cached, or make a recursive query to '.' (root DNS), then to '.to.' The '.to.' server will have nameserver information for 'yp.to.' which gets queried next. 2. The nameserver for 'yp.to' is looked up. In this case, it's `uz5jmyqz3gz2bhnuzg0rr0cml9u8pntyhn2jhtqn04yt3sm5h235c1.yp.to.' 3. The A records for that NS record are '131.193.32.109' and '131.193.32.108', both of which belong to an IPv4 block owned by the University of Illinois at Chicago. 4. Your computer queries the A record(s) for the subdomain, 'cr.yp.to.' from the nameserver for 'yp.to.' which in this case points to the same two IPs as the nameserver. 5. Depending on your OS/Browser, you will make an HTTP or HTTPS connection with that server and begin to download site content. So, no you don't "make a hop" through Tonga, but the '.to.' nameserver will receive a request (if it's not cached by your resolver) to resolve the 'yp.to.' server.

codegladiator 6y ago

> But Google has x million machines That's because google has that amount of traffic. I am sure a hn hug would take the cypto site down.