cos

This must be an interesting problem, because I'm still thinking about it after 1.5 days... I want to simulate a few scenarios to see if I can generate some pretty looking charts, but first I want to make sure I'm understanding your algorithm correctly. Is the following pseudocode accurate?

/*
'place' is a given range of 16 IP addresses
'lastConnect' is the last time a 'place' made a connection
'time' is the current time
'load0' is the current load on server 0
'load1' is the current load on server 1

Returns 0 or 1 corresponding to one of two webservers
*/

chooseServer( place )
{
    lastConnect = lookup_last_connect_time( place );

    if ( time - lastConnect < 20 minutes )
        return lookup_last_server_connected( place );

    else if ( load0 == load1 )
        return random( 0 or 1 );

    else
        return ( load0 < load1 )? 0 : 1;
}