Hundreds of nameservers scattered around the globe with anycast absolutely helps.
The main thing between a DNS request and a DNS response is network round trip time. Actually processing the request should be trivial (especially for .org, but even at .com), the zone file may be large compared to most, but it's all static records, with batched updates. I remember when internic would do updates at midnight, but you might not make it in the batch; mostly I see 5-20 minute delays on changes now.
The main thing between a DNS request and a DNS response is network round trip time. Actually processing the request should be trivial (especially for .org, but even at .com), the zone file may be large compared to most, but it's all static records, with batched updates. I remember when internic would do updates at midnight, but you might not make it in the batch; mostly I see 5-20 minute delays on changes now.