Patent ID: 7257644

Claim:
A method for providing presence tracking of nodes of a logical network having an underlying physical network medium in a distributed computing system, comprising: tracking by each node in the logical network the presence state of at least one other node; and optimizing bandwidth utilization of the physical network medium based upon the presence state of at least one node in the logical network, wherein each part is assigned different values for sending and sampling keep alive messages, wherein the logical network has a node identification (node ID) address space for identifying each node and its associated values for sending and sampling keep alive messages, wherein a first group of node IDs are assigned to fast presence devices, while a second group of node IDs part are assigned to slow presence devices, wherein the node ID address space is split into two parts, and wherein said optimizing includes optimizing at least five application variables including (A) a PresenceSlowBaseld variable that designates the node ID where the logical split between fast presence devices and slow presence devices occurs; (B) a PresenceFastRefresh variable that designates the PresenceRefresh value to be used to track devices with a node ID less than the value specified by the PresenceSlowBaseld variable, (C) a PresenceFastTimeout variable that designates the PresenceTimeout value to be used to track devices with a node ID less than the value specified by the PresenceSlowBaseld variable, (D) a PresenceSlowRefresh variable that designates the PresenceRefresh value to be used to track devices with a node ID that is at least the value specified by the PresenceSlowBaseld variable and (E) a PresenceSlowTimeout variable that designates the PresenceTimeout value to be used to track devices with a node ID that is at least the value specified by the PresenceSlowBaseld variable.