Re: random host

--- Gabor Hojtsy <gabor@hojtsy.hu> wrote: > >>But if we have a select few mirrors, having this automatically work with > >>the user's country will be hard. There is no data available whether a > >>German mirror would be closer to me or a British one. Germany is closer > >>geographically, but I may have a much better connection to Great Britain. > >> > >>If we would be able to trust all mirrors then it would be much easier to > >>make this thing "close mirror" friendly. But what if there will be no > >>trusted mirrors in Hungary? How can some code detect which mirror has > >>better connection the network I am connected to? > > > > Geographic location, or closeness, isn't neseccarily related to Internet > > 'closeness'. Typically, the closer a server is to a backbone, that is a > > major upstream provider, the closer that server is to all other servers. > > Trying to detect what country a server is in isn't as useful as knowing > how > > well connected the server is; what counts are hops, and after that it's > the > > bit pipe. > > If a mirror is in the same country then me, that it is probably very > fast, as AFAIK every country or region has it's own Internet Excange, > where the local providers are interconnected to exchange local traffic. > At least we have this :) > > So having the php.net backbone some user's can get immediately to a > close mirror (a mirror in their country) if such a mirror exists on the > backbone. Other countries can only get a random mirror. > > Note that I am just playing with the ideas to get this random stuff a > bit more close to user expectations. Understandable, but if a user can tell the difference between a host in their country, and one at a major peer-point in Europe I'd be very surprised :) And the same goes for states here in the US. For instance, it's often faster for me to hit a UK/German PHP mirror from one of my locations here in NY, even though there's a mirror that's geographically much closer. Why? Because the UK/German mirrors are very well connected, where as the mirror that is actually geographically closer to me has connectivity/resource problems. In a previous message, James suggested that we take the top ten mirrors and begin to implement the random.php.net round-robin system. I'm all for it, but am not sure how we'd find the top ten mirrors. If the mirror list is available in a nice plain-text format (*not* XML :) I'd be happy to run it through some network metric software to help determine which are good canidates for the top ten. Best, H