load sharing help

[Barry Margolin]

In article <E56C286B7760D31189A2009027B0FF733BA7E0 at missmuffet.mamamedia.com>,
Adrian Goins  <Adrian at mamamedia.com> wrote:
>having multiple IPs under one hostname is not load sharing.  this is called
>'round-robin' and causes BIND to send all IPs back to the client.  the
>client is then served by whomever answers it first.

I don't know of many clients that work this way.  Most clients simply use
the first address in the list, and round-robin results in load sharing
because different clients will get responses with a different address
first.  Some clients will try additional addresses if the first connection
failed, but I believe these are relatively uncommon (Unix telnet will do
this, as will some mailers, but I suspect that most browsers will not).

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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