Better than ping (NOT!)

Mike Batchelor mikebat at tmcs.net
Fri Oct 26 23:30:36 UTC 2001


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> Aside from the silliness of "can I ping you?", someone did make the
> > valuable observation that ping might not be the best way to measure
> content delivery performance.

I have heard some pretty bizarre proposals from certain vendors about what
they've been thinking of doing.

> A better way would be to measure the actual delivery performance by
> noting the size and delivery time for an actual bonafide request.

Hey, why bother measuring and all that stuff?  TCP SYN comes in to load
balancer, load balancer simply dispatches  copies of the packet to all
available real servers (with some fixups and spoofing the client's IP
address), whichever one finishes the TCP handshake with the client first, is
by definition, the fastest one.

Hoo boy, I almost fell out of my chair when I heard this one described for
the first time.  I do not know if it was ever deployed in a shipping
product.

- ---
"The avalanche has already begun.  It is too late for the pebbles to vote" -
Kosh

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