[10454] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Mirror Negotiation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Koen Holtman)
Mon Dec 9 18:25:02 1996
From: koen@win.tue.nl (Koen Holtman)
To: bmorin@WPI.EDU (Brian Morin)
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 00:07:43 +0100 (MET)
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <01BBE5F0.C0E07D70@shampoo.res.WPI.EDU> from "Brian Morin" at Dec 9, 96 04:48:06 pm
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
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.
