5 seconds is very good if you can attain it. I have two Nokia IP650s running with VRRP monitored circuits. The firewalls are constantly trading vrrp packets and firewall table sync state. The fastest failover I've gotten it down to is about 30 seconds with complete stateful failover. This has worked well for my applications, which are financial revenue based trading apps. By the time the trader's screen has frozen, it takes them about 15 seconds to bang on the keyboard, 5 seconds to get up and scream, and 10 seconds to call someone, by the time its already failed over ;-). -----Original Message----- From: James DeMong [mailto:James.DeMong@telus.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 12:20 PM To: Nanog@Merit. Edu (E-mail) Subject: Hosting Failover Question I am looking for a Rule of Thumb on failover for hosting, mostly tcp(webserver), some udp (audio/video streaming) stuff. My thought is that 5 seconds to failover when a network element(switch/router/load balancer/FW) fails is reasonable. How many seconds is reasonable for fail over in such a situation? Thanks in advance. __ James DeMong Network Design Specialist TELUS Advanced Communications Phone: (403) 503-3718 Email: James.DeMong@telus.com