Ideally, I wouldn't find any kind of "session" to time out. Almost everyone is fine with short outages (few seconds) as long as their apps don't time out. While 5 seconds is great, I think you'll have a hard time getting there. You'll have to exchange tons of "hello" type packets which means you're flooding a lot of traffic. You can control it at ports, but it's still a pain. At 6/6/01, you wrote:

I am interested what I should design to.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Froutan [mailto:pfroutan@rackspace.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 1:23 PM To: Nanog@Merit. Edu (E-mail) Subject: Re: Hosting Failover Question

What do you mean by "reasonable"? Do you mean what you can expect right now at a hoster, or what you should aim for when designing a system?

At 6/6/01, James DeMong wrote:

...

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

---------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul Froutan Email: pfroutan@rackspace.com Rackspace Managed Hosting <http://www.rackspace.com>