Network for Sale

Wed Feb 21 21:23:31 UTC 2001

> > RTT doesn't drive performance, (bw*delay)-loss does.
> 
> FWIW, the heavily interactive apps are more affected by RTT than they are
> by bandwidth. Network games are the new TELNET. They despise varying
> latency levels, and are generally oblivious to bandwidth. Your point is
> still mostly valid, in that the only thing they hate more than varying
> latency is packet loss, but if the network isn't losing packets then RTT
> does affect "perfomance" for the heavily interactive apps.

i wasn't talking about network performance in general.  (and i would never,
ever recommend (bw*delay)-loss as a routing metric!)  this is in the context
of so-called global server load balancing.  RTT may, or may not, matter in
the decisions such a system must make ("serve this client from which proxy?")