Name servers propagation

[The Moose]

Overthr last 18 months, the time it takes for changes to bits of information suh as nmeservers has reduced massively from 24 hours down to a change I made last night resulting in an almost instantaneous change.

The domain I was working on at the time is in the USA so it can't be because it is local here.

Does anyone have any idea as to why/how...???

Moose

P. S. I'm not complaining, just interested!!

[JamieBeeston]

Depends on what you're doing

Editing an existing record is still likely to need overnight
Adding a new record will be much quicker

Depends on what DNS servers you're using (default for your ISP or OpenDNS etc)
Depends on what ISP you're using too..

Multitude of factors

[Accelebrate]

I've noticed this over the last year or two as well, some of the earlier domains I registered around y2k took much longer to propagate.

[onomatopoeia]

DNS is a caching system, this affects how changes propogate.

New A record should be instant as it wont be cached anywhere so will trigger lookups to the authoritative servers.

Modifying an existing record will depend what the refresh interval is set to in the SOA record. If it's three days then you might have a long wait for your change to propogate to the whole interweb.

I recommend reading DNS and BIND published by O'Reilly.