Re: [Fwd: Re: [Sks-devel] Alternative to round-robin (was Re: pool.sks-keyservers.net having trouble?)]

[David Shaw]

On Apr 6, 2010, at 3:17 PM, Jeff Johnson wrote:

> 
> On Apr 6, 2010, at 2:37 PM, David Shaw wrote:
>> 
>> Just rig it up similarly to how DNS does it.  Rank things in order of 
>> performance, and then artificially penalize the fastest ones on each 
>> iteration until they aren't the fastest any more.  Then repeat.  The goal 
>> isn't perfection - it's just to be better than round robin :)
>> 
> 
> No disagreement that "round robin" isn't feeble, even if "fair".
> 
> It would certainly be nice if there was some means to get at DNS
> metrics from outside.
> 
> Off the top of my head (i.e 2minutes of thought), I can't think of
> an easy way to get at those DNS metric "innards" in spite of
> having used DNS professionally for like 30 years.

I think you can get them by dumping the nameserver cache (dumpdb).  They're in 
there as comments, so parsing them out might be a bit odd.

Even so, I wasn't very clear - I didn't mean to literally use the DNS values, 
but rather hit each SKS server periodically and time the transaction (only 
similar to how DNS does it).  Kristian already checks each server periodically 
- I was thinking if he added performance measurements to his current tests, it 
could be used to rank things in the SRV list.  Of course, this is measuring 
things from his particular network perspective, so it might be wrong for 
everyone else...

> But I'm sure there's something that could be hacked up and whacked together,
> there always is in uglix ;-)

But of course!

David