Ping triangulation

Michael Dillon michael at memra.com
Sat Jul 27 02:08:26 UTC 1996


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 at memra.com






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