Dear All, I'd like to provide some background information mostly about bandwidth usage that can help this discussion. For RIPE Atlas anchors, we're always asking the host to be prepared for traffic up to 10Mb/sec. However, in reality we're very far from using this much at the moment: anchors that are involved in DNSMON measurements use about 256kb/sec, whereas anchors that don't do DNSMON measurements use about 50kb/sec. About probes: a v4 only probe uses ~4kb/sec, a v4+v6 probe uses ~7kb/sec. See also: https://atlas.ripe.net/about/faq/#how-much-bandwidth-will-the-probe-consume All of these numbers are on average, based on checking some random anchors/probes. Surely there are probes that use more (or less) average bandwidth than the numbers I mentioned. The HTTP service provided by the anchors limits the response size to about 4KB, so even with all the overhead it fits in a few TCP packets, which is practically in the same ballpark as the other measurements we already allow (or even less, if one thinks about traceroutes...) We'll also enforce the usual limits like maximum number of probes per measurement and minimum measurement frequency. Regards, Robert On 2015-01-07 21:34, Bryan Socha wrote:
I love the idea but unless you can profile what available capacity the probe/anchor has I don't think the resulting measurements will be useable. There is no way to know your http request was slow because someone with the end point is a hard core torrent user maxing their location out. Also valid for the areas where you have a hard limit and minimal extra bandwidth. ping/traceroute while not always a good test does squeeze through with minimal variance in result when the site bandwidth is congested.
also as an anchor host, can I limit the max bps because some locations is not low cost if everyone decides to http test some speedtest file. Our singapore anchor for example would cost more per month then we spent on the hardware to host an anchor in the first place. I suspect the probe/anchor hosts in other areas like africa, australia, new zealand, and south america would get even larger monthly bills.
Bryan Socha Network Engineer DigitalOcean