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Development Tools Technology Foundations DNS Basics Root Servers

Posted by Peter Varga
Peter Varga
2,442 Points

the number of root servers [in total]

here stated 13.

however, found this:

"The use of anycast addressing permits the actual number of root server instances to be much larger, and is 504 as of 10 October 2014."

not sure if obsolete, or not understood corrrectly.

1 Answer

Pepe Toño
Pepe Toño
13,815 Points
Pepe Toño
Pepe Toño
13,815 Points

Hi i made some research about your question because its an smart one, and after looking at the web i found some facts that could answer it.

The ICANN organization set up the number of 13 main logical root name servers due to some DNS y UDP limitations (concerning about the size data packages) .

With the growth of the Internet, network services increasingly have high-availability requirements, so among all routing and addressing methodologies were selected one, and here is where "Anycast" entered the game. This routing methodology increases query performance, redundancy and load balancing, so as consequence the amount of root servers instances increased (504 int October 2014), just to satisfy the network demand.