I was checking out the Beijing 2008 official Olympics site, today, and noticed it took longer than normal to resolve.  At first, I thought - ok, it's in China, so 250-300ms latency hit is going to be normal.  Well, yes and no:

% host en.beijing2008.cn
en.beijing2008.cn is an alias for www.o.a.sohu.com.
www.o.a.sohu.com is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.chinacache.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.chinacache.net is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.cnc.chinacache.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.cnc.chinacache.net is an alias for www.beijing2008.cn.edgesuite.net.
www.beijing2008.cn.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1532.g.akamai.net.
a1532.g.akamai.net has address 72.247.238.211
a1532.g.akamai.net has address 72.247.238.224

Yep, you read it right, five CNAMEs.  To make matters worse, sohu.com and chinacache.net's nameservers are all located in China.  If you have even the slightest idea of how DNS works, it should be apparent that this setup is just a tad inefficient.

Sure, eventually the content comes from a regional Akamai cache, if you can deal with the initial page load time of a couple seconds, even on a 10GbE link.

China's once again showing their technological superiority!  This is going to be a fun Olympics.

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