Re: interop problems with getaddrinfo() address selection

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

Tony Finch wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, der Mouse wrote:
>   
>> I'm interseted in what sort of problems it causes.
>>     
>
> DNS round robin is effective at balancing load evenly across multiple
> servers, because each client is (in effect) directed to one of the servers
> at random. If the client sorts the DNS response before using it then the
> randomization is defeated and the load on the servers is no longer
> balanced.
>   
this seems like an almost-inherent consequence of IPv6's expecting hosts
to have multiple addresses and asking hosts initiating a communication
to do address selection.  it's not specific to getaddrinfo() - any API
that tried to solve that problem would be likely to reorder addresses to
some degree.

though it should be possible for the client implementation to go through
the list of addresses, assign a preference value to each one (based on
address type and number of leading bits in common with one of the
hosts's local addresses), then perform a stable sort by preference value.