Re: Keynote/Boardwatch Internet Backbone Index A better test!!!

[Taner Halicioglu <taner () isi net>]

On Fri, 27 Jun 1997, Mike Hedlund wrote:

> Personally, i dont think checking the network path to www.'NSP'.net is the
> correct way to do it. To me, tracing the path from multiple locations TO

Exactly.  Take SprintLink as an example.

www.sprintlink.net and www.sprint.com are the same box
[martha.commerce.com (198.70.62.12)], but that sits off some T1 somewhere.
www.sprint.net (aka ftp.sprintlink.net) seems to be in a better position
network-wise to determine real network performance.

It's highly unlikely that I'll burn an FE port to stick a web server up --
it's more likely that I'll put the www machine on a shared 10M segment
with other corporate machines.

Also, not everyone will use the fastest machine in the world as their web
server -- expecially for the company (corporate) machine.

> www.'NSPs-Customer'.com is better.. altho that doesnt take into account
> 'peak' times, anomolies, freakish events, position of the moon.. etc..

Hopefully these would be global effects that would show up in everyone's
data - since KeyNote apparently performed the tests from "from 27 major
metropolitan areas in the United States".  Oh, does that say 'United
States'?  No wonder Bell Canada got screwed.

> However, i do find stats kind of entertaining to interpret, i dont think
> there is a way to set in stone that by doing X you can find a 'perfect'
> value that represents the statistics from A to B.

It sounds like their metric was strictly a 'download time' mertic - maybe
they also took into account the time to connect() - but either way they
are depending on one machine to judge an entire network -- which is a
highly flawed metric.  Also, what if it takes 3 GET's to download 50k on
one server, and on another it takes 20 GET's?  That is a *huge* difference
in overhead for the server.  I wonder how much they thought about their
measuring methods before they decided to implement them.

So how *do* you "correctly" measure a provider's bandwidth and
performance?  Well, I don't think there is any simple answer to that
question -- if one at all -- as Mike points out :-)

I'd like to see Keynote publish some details on how, exactly, they
performed the tests - and exactly what tests they performed.

        -Taner
--
      D. Taner Halicioglu                     taner () isi net
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