[wplug] OT - request for comment on an idea

[Poyner, Brandon]

> Can you give some different examples of low-TTL-drawbacks?

It is possible to shoot yourself in the foot here, but you'd have to be
a high volume site.  I recall reading about a scenario where the TTL was
set very low and the network was dropping packets/corrupting packets.
DNS starts out on UDP packets and if the requester does not receive a
response or the response has been corrupted it will send another UDP
request.  That goes on until the requester decides to switch to the
way-more-expensive but reliable TCP packets.  If the TTL is too low you
can actually end up getting more TCP requests than you can handle at
once.  This is more than a theoretical situation, but if you're that
high of a volume these days you'd be on Akamai or something similar.

Brandon Poyner
Network Engineer III
CCAC - College Office
412-237-3086