On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 05:23:17PM -0800, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> You don't even need to modify the protocol. Just write a small
> tcp program that times the 3 way handshake on open to all the
> servers, take the one with the sortest time and spit that out
> for the user to stuff in his cvsupfile.
>
> 15 lines of perl should be more than enough :-)
Unfortunately, timing a three-way handshake would give you a very
coarse measurement of the packet loss, jitter and bandwidth between the
client and server. It would give you a better measurement of the
latency, but still (statistically speaking) quite a poor one.
Cvsup sessions tend to be long-lived, which means other factors
can have much more dramatic effect on session performance:
+ packet loss
+ path bandwidth
+ optimisation of TCP stacks at either end to the round-trip
latency of the network path (RFC1323 and SACK support, for example)
The only effective way to _really_ measure the cumulative effect of
all these is to model a representative cvsup session to multiple servers,
and compare performance. This is pretty much what John was recommending
in the first place by "why not try a different server every once in
a while" :)
You could automate this like this (and no doubt in other ways):
+ install a small, representatively-sized but junk collection on
every cvsup mirror server
+ every week (say) pull the entire junk collection down from scratch
from a selection of likely servers, and store the relative time taken
to do so.
This should give you a relative performance metric between the servers
you measured, hopefully with local network performance variations
cancelled out by the fact that all tests are run around the same time.
Joe
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