Patent ID: 7039916

Claim:
A system comprising: a communications interface configurable to monitor messages on a network; a processor coupled with the communications interface; and a machine-readable medium coupled with the processor, the machine-readable medium being configured to instruct the processor to access machine-readable instructions to cause the processor to perform operations including, identifying a message requesting a connection with a data delivery system having a plurality of nodes, initiating a tracking of a duration after the message identification, and identifying a node of the data delivery system as being overloaded, based upon the tracked duration, to facilitate adjusting assignment of connection requests to the node, wherein the tracked duration comprises an amount of time between a time associated with the message requesting the connection and either a time associated with an acknowledging message from the node, which is used to establish the connection with the node, or a termination of a time-out period during which no acknowledging message is returned by the node.