Redundant Web servers

[Tom Metro]

Daniel Feenberg wrote:
> ...5 minutes (our DNS TTL)...
> 
> On our web site all internal links are relative. This means that once a 
> browser session finds a working server, it will stay with that server - so 
> there is only one delay per visitor. If the links were absolute, then 
> there would be a delay on 50% of page views, not very attractive.

If the browser and OS honor your TTL in their DNS cache, and the browser 
is either not using keep alive or the keep alive connection has timed 
out, I would expect the next page retrieval after a 5+ minute delay will 
trigger another DNS lookup, and potentially another connection timeout. 
If the site has lengthly content that takes time to read, such a delay 
may not be unusual.

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/