Re: Mark Allman: Internet measurement: what next?

[Matt Levine <matt () deliver3 com>]

On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 12:24AM, Jack Bates wrote:

> E.B. Dreger wrote:
> SL> Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 19:47:53 +0100
> SL> From: Simon Lockhart
>
>
> SL> As predominantly a content hoster, I'd love to know more about the 
> path
> SL> between my servers and the end user. Stuff like how much bandwidth 
> is
> SL> available (or, potentially available, to remove the congestion 
> issue),
> SL> in real time (i.e. as fast as PMTUD works). Really stuff so I can 
> decide
>
> It would be tricky, but I've heard of using javascript (not applicable 
> with all EU's of course) to calculate the throughput (similar to 
> various bandwidth testing pages) and set the results in a hidden field 
> which the user would then submit in a form. Something to ponder when 
> designing your various forms.
>
> Of course, a better method would be to ask your visitors to provide 
> the information by running an applet which could feed you a lot of b/w 
> and latency information. Total capacity would be a little more 
> difficult and various theories used to calculate it blind don't work 
> from dialups and are questionable on broadband.
>
> With the number of people that play with SETI and other distributed 
> systems, I was thinking it'd be interesting to build a 'net monitor 
> based on the same premise, pulling latency information peer to peer as 
> well as building path maps using the multiple views. While we have 
> this to some degree, 1M 'doze boxes would provide a lot more granular 
> detail. Overall performance through certain paths could also be 
> determined.

Gomez seems to be trying to do this, with a monetary incentive:

http://www.porivo.com/peernetwork/jsp/index.jsp

> -Jack
--
Matt Levine <matt () deliver3 com>
"The Trouble with doing anything right the first time is that nobody 
appreciates how difficult it was."  -BIX