Slow DTD delivery

Hi.

When fetching contents from w3.org, the latency experienced is not 
really any problem.

Except when trying to fetch some HTML DTD. This is really slow, and 
sometimes the time-out limit in a browser can be surpassed, which means 
that the browser regards the server site as not responding.

To better understand these symptoms: ...

*Question*:
  - is there a special w3 server dedicated to common DTDs, and this 
server has recently become overloaded?
  - is it a load-balancing issue?
  - or is it the effect of some platform resource usage policy?

It is interesting that DTD should not be any serious bottleneck. They 
have a fairly long valid duration -- e.g. for html4/loose.dtd   a header 
says "Expires: Tue, 24 May 2011 15:21:41 GMT".

The trigger for this question was when a user called the Swedish Office 
to ask about "why Internet Explorer could not deliver a page (from 
somewhere.com) because the loose.dtd could not be found". I did look 
around, and that was when I became aware of the dtd delivery delays.

Regards,

/olle

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Olle Olsson   olleo@sics.se   Tel: +46 8 633 15 19  Fax: +46 8 751 72 30
         [Svenska W3C-kontoret: olleo@w3.org]
SICS [Swedish Institute of Computer Science]
Box 1263
SE - 164 29 Kista
Sweden
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