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Re: Mark Allman: Internet measurement: what next?

  • From: Matt Levine
  • Date: Tue Jul 08 11:40:24 2003 
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 <[email protected]>
"The Trouble with doing anything right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was." -BIX