I believe you are correct, they do use the IP number as the basis of
stickyness. But, they have reasons to believe that this shouldn't be a
problem.
See "sticky network aggregation", page 6.
See "sticky network aggregation", page 56.
Basically, they say that even though all AOL traffic gets routed to one
server, the other visitors get spread to the other servers anyways, so
the load does get evenly balanced in the big picture. I suppose a
potential problem would be if so many people come from AOL that they can
saturate the resources on that one server.
They also have the ability to put a subnet mask on a sticky connection
for ISPs a that use multiple outgoing proxies.
Theo Schlossnagle wrote:
>
> On Monday, September 17, 2001, at 03:00 PM, Monte Ohrt wrote:
> > I thought that is what I was describing? See page 46 of the user manual
> > about "inter-cluster stickyness."
> >
> > http://www.coyotepoint.com/manual.pdf
>
> Very interesting. They say they do it, but they don't say how. I am
> interested in how they accomplish this. If anyone knows, please post.
>
> I have an eerie feeling that they stick the end user based on the IP
> they come from. This method is fundamentally broken. For AOL users and
> other users of ISPs who do aggressive transparent caching can come from
> different IP addresses for the image on the same page! If this is the
> method that is used, I suggest never using it or you will see all sorts
> of problems.
>
> --
> Theo Schlossnagle
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>
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--
Monte Ohrt <monte@ispi.net>
http://www.ispi.net/