way to inform rev apps to get something from web server

[Alex Tweedly]

Andre Garzia wrote:
> Alex,
>
> are trying to save bandwidth? oops, I've missed that part, I though he
> was afraid the server would enter DoS or something. I agree that using
> a balancer will do absolutelly nothing about bandwidth costs or usage,
> and yes, you're right about pound getting all the requests before
> distributing them.
>   
I was trying to save bandwidth, but that was based purely on the mention 
in the original email that he'd like to find a "less 'badnwidth 
wasteful' way ..."   I suspect that the scheme sims has already 
implemented should reduce the concern about bandwidth to being much less 
important than server load.
> So what about transfering some balance logic into the client
> application. It could first download a simple text file with a list of
> available servers and with each request go round-robin them. This will
> not save bandwidth (I don't know how to do that) but would help
> distributing things among a pool if the traffic gets high. The file
> could have the ip of the server and some priority or something like
> that, so in case of timeouts and some little math, things could be
> worked out.
>
>   
That sounds like a very good idea - especially helpful for when there is 
an update.
> As for saving bandwidth, why not use GZip encoding for the transfers,
> it saves some bytes.
>   
Yep. And it's probably not essential to *reduce* bandwidth, merely to 
distribute it well enough, so if the server pool is distributed (i.e. on 
multiple ISPs rather than all on the same site) then client-side load 
balancing should get us there. And if all else fails, and they are 
wildly successful, then presumably they'll be making enough money to 
just pay Akamai or Edgecast to handle it for them :-)

-- Alex.