Ginka is less stable than usual, lately.
DNS issues: http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,48047.0.html
It's over TCP. That'd matter if we were connecting... but randomly dropping is not a DNS issue.
Case is right. Once you've resolved a name to ip, dns has no more use. Keeping a reliable connection requires packets to be able to traverse multiple networks from point A to B. I've done some of my own testing while being booted from the game, and I'm not sure if it is networking or systems at this point.
Next time you get severe lag, open up a terminal or command prompt and check a traceroute (or for windows, tracert) to ginka.armageddon.org. If it dies somewhere along the way, it's a networking issue. If it gets all the way there, it's probably a systems issue. Unfortunately with networking, you can't control everyone's autonomous system, so if someone out there has the best path to ginka, and their network is oversubscribed (or any other reason their network sucks), there's not much that can be done. The provider of ginka could prepend their AS PATH to their upstreams in order to have one path be preferred over another, or use other BGP black magic, but that's only if they have multiple upstreams.
Anyway, enough ranting. Yes, I've also noticed some things too. I thought maybe it was just a large backup that was occurring and taking up system resources, as it happened to me promptly at 1:00pm pacific time (usually cron jobs run on the hour, so...)
