On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Alan Hannan wrote:
Isn't IBM doing some sort of fancy load redistribution for the WWW servers its running for the 1996 Summer Olympics? I seem to recall they were determining the "closest" server via a technique called "ping triangulation", whatever that is.
Ping times only correlate to available bandwidth when congestion is bad. Otherwise these two factors are militantly unrelated to each other.
Triangulation implies that they are sampling ping times from two or more different routes. They may be relying on this to warn them when paths are becoming congested as opposed to using ping times as a means of measuring which is the better of two uncongested paths. If the ping triangulation is a process separate from web serving that is continuously sampling paths and adjusting web server routing (redirects) dynamically then it may well have some value. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com