Well, i simply pointed out that solution based on *hosts* choosing the best paths in global networks is not going to work. It is in the same category as source-based routing. The network is simply too large for end-hosts to be able to make any useful decisions. I though that was understood long time ago, so nowadays resolvers do not even attempt to guess which address is best in case of multihomed hosts (beyond obvious directly-connected network trick). Pinging all addresses may be worse than just talking to a random server. To make any meaningful measurement you need to send many dozens of probe packets. Incidentally, that is about as much as the average WWW exchange takes. So the real solution is not to bother, and concentrate on demand-side cacheing. --vadim PS I would also be sceptical about attempts to "try" such things as perpetuum mobile or palm reading just on the chance that they may work. PPS The funny thing is that there's a hope that a good heuristic can be found -- since the network is rather hierarchal a good choice of topologically significant addressing is likely to produce situation in which bit distance between addresses is a good approximation of some "goodput" metric! This is very much the same effect as that of well-placed aggregation which produces routes close to optimal with a lot less information. Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 20:30:38 -0400 From: "Mike O'Dell" <mo@uunet.uu.net> Vadim, Yes, caching is a good idea (technically). And who said "AS path length" was a wonderful global metric??? just because the "usual suspects" BGP implementation generally does route selection based on that attribute doesn't mean that's the ONLY thing one can do. Depending on how much additional information one wished to supply about ASes, their general level of connectivity, and geographic location, one can conceivably produce hybrid metrics, probably heuristic, which reflect some sense of "performance". for example, the server could do round-trip measurements to "sufficiently interesting" ASes so that it could base its behavior on observations. the goal wouldn't be to do fine-grained decision-making, but if the "Bruce Springsteen Ticket Server" caused some reasonably long-lived congestion, it might be worthwhile redirecting some responses. The assumption is that this special DNS server might be concentrated on fielding responses for a special set of servers, like special Web servers (could be caches), and not general connectivity. So while few things are perfectly-universal solutions, the prospect of implementing heuristics that we all use today in getting a sense of how things are going, and what to try when the first guess is hosed, seems like a worthwhile attempt. some will work better than others. that is neither news, nor a reason to not try it. -mo