RE: Mirror Negotiation

Koen Holtman Wrote:
"It is not easy for a client to quickly determine which mirror which offers
the highest bandwidth.  A HTTP protocol element for sending a list of
mirrors to the client only solves the easy part of the problem."

I actually had more in mind when I wrote the original post, however I thought I'd see how the basic idea would fly before getting specific.

If we assume that mirrors physicaly closer to the client are probably faster than ones further away or on another land mass, then including some kind of geographic location code with each mirror entry would help.  The client could then experiment with the mirrors that appear most promising.

Koen Holtman Wrote:
"I believe that there can already be some mirror negotiation when resolving a
hostname to an IP address, but I don't know how effective that is."

My understanding of this is that it allows requests to be distributed among several servers on the same site.  Perhaps this could be extended (I'm not very familiar with these protocols), however I think that you would have to mirror entire hosts and make the decision of what mirror to use at the server side.  I already made the argument that determining what mirror to use at the server side is inferior to the client side.

Brian Morin
Student at WPI
Author of Fnord Web Server

Received on Monday, 9 December 1996 18:58:06 UTC