Google tuning

Even though Google's new Cape Town nodes are in limited production / test mode, users have been connecting to both the local data-centre, as well as to overseas datacentres [e.g. London?].

Presumably Google is still tuning the DNS based on usage while simultaneously expanding the datacentre capacity.

Interestingly it is only mail.google.com that returns a non-local host. So apparently mail is not amenable to normal caching modes or it would have been done through either the [presumed] GGCs or even transparently cached within the Cape Town datacentre.

Let's hope that Google get some cheap capacity on SEACOM even though is has higher latency than SAT-3 (~215 ms vs ~150 ms). Since most of the front-end logic (e.g. client javascript) would be served by local machines, interactivity should not be compromised too much.