What are realistic scenarios for root name service degradation then?
The main concern are denial of service attacks or just plain increased load.The monthly average load of all root name servers in September 2007 is more than 118,000 queries per second (90,000 in December 2004) with regular peaks at several times the average which are handled gracefully.This is more than 10 billion (10^10) queries on average every day.These days load induced service degradations are more likely caused by network problems than by overload of the servers themselves: servers continue to answer all queries that get to them but not all queries may get there.Serious DDoS attacks can overload parts of the network infrastructure.
