Make use of DNS.
2006-11-24
As a software developer you sometimes need to allow your program to check for updates.
I think the best example of this is antivirus that checks very often for updates.
This traffic can be quite large for a successfull software and with a couple of thousand people constantly checking for updates
can be expensive in term of bandwidth use and server resources.

Its here we can make good use of the largest distributed database in the world. The DNS.
Often the software checks for updates by questioning for the latest build of a software/datafile. This can be a date or an 
incrimenting number starting from "whatever".
By moving this simple data into the DNS-system and use a well tuned TTL (time to live) many users from a ISP (sharing DNS resolver server)
can query as much they want and the data will only be fetched from the software companys server when a TTL has expired and will not
have the overhead of TCP and HTTP that is often used for updates.

Example (i will use my favorite Antivirus as a possible user) : 
The host latest.eng.xp32bit.nod32.com could be resolved to 119.146.216.45 wich correlates to the datestamp 2006112301 (YYYYMMDDRR) and maybe should have
a TTL set to 30min to an hour.
So when lets say 1000 of users on a large ISP checks for updates within the specefied TTL virtually no traffic goes out of the ISPs own net and this is a good
thing for both the ISP and the software company.

/ info (at) netrogenic (dot) com