* Shawn Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-07-16 22:28]:
> 3) Automatic "preferred" mirror selection
>
> There are a number of techniques that I've seen used over the years to
> determine the best mirror to connect to. I've seen package managers use
> average ping time, average transfer speed, round-robin, and even random
> selection to determine which mirror to use from an available list.
>
> One thought that occurred to me today was to base selection on closest
> timezone (a mirror in the same timezone as you is likely to provide a
> better experience than one in another timezone).
>
> In fact, a combination of techniques could be used to isolate the best
> one to mark as the preferred mirror. For example, we could get the
> mirrors in the same timezone first (then move up to the next greater
> criteria), then check response time, then check speed, etc. until we
> narrow it down to a specific one.
My guess is that your timezone proposal is to manage congestion. I'm
not sure that this heuristic would be better than one based on actual
measurements (since those would reflect the operation times, rather
than the coincidence of an average day). In any case, you might enjoy
Sivasubramanian et al., Replication for Web Hosting Systems, ACM
Computing Surveys, September 2004.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1035570.1035573
which discusses choices for replication, and introduces a number of
conventions for measuring aspects of a replicated system. We're
trying to do something a bit outside the paper (since we want to have
a collection of independent mirrors, rather than a singly
administrated set of replicated sites), but it's a useful framework.
- Stephen
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