More information about this can be found at the Netscape Preferences Fix home page . This is not a sound recommendation, because empirical evidence and scientific inquiry show clearly that geographical nearness is not a valid indicator for network efficiency. This and other important results are found in this most interesting paper by Mark E. Crovella and Robert L. Carter , which I found almost by chance with Alta Vista . Thus, the distance in hops between two hosts is not necessarily a good predictor of the expected latency of a document transfer. The extra cost at runtime incurred by dynamic latency measurement, as compared to prior static knowledge of hop distances, is well justified based on the resulting improved performance.
Selection based on dynamic latency measurement is preferable to random selection.
As an added bonus, you gain fault tolerance. Network congestion plays a significant role in the overall distribution of round trip times. In fact, even random server selection is preferable to choosing any static server for documents larger than 5K bytes. If there is demand, I will build a 68000 version for separate distribution. QuickestMirror measures Accurate Round Trip Time as described by Sustainable Softworks .