Re: Mirror Negotiation

Brian Morin:
[....]
>In all of the flavors of HTTP I've seen, the only grammar for
>negotiating where information is retrieved from is the simple redirect
>from the server.  Would it be a good idea to send a list of alternative
>locations a resource or a group of resources can be acquired so the
>client can select the fastest location without user involvement?

Transparent content negotiation sends lists of variant resources to
negotiate on a lot of things, but not on mirrors.  See
http://www.gewis.win.tue.nl/~koen/conneg for links to the draft
specification.

>Is there anything I'm overlooking?

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 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.

>Has there been any work in this area?

Not that I know of.

>Brian Morin

Koen.

Received on Monday, 9 December 1996 18:07:49 UTC