RE: OT: ebay sniping

["Alan Kroeger" <alan@akroeger.com>]

You could be right and then again depending on if there app is
distributed there could still be some latency. The minimum number of app
servers here is a web server and a database server you could add a queue
server and  a transaction processor too they would add some latency, but
still if you proxied using there software your bid should come first. I
guess the snipers are really playing a random game I was sniped by a
shark who contacted me within five minutes of the end of the bid who
wanted to sell to me at an additional profit I didn't acknowledge him.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis Leas [mailto:dennis@mail.worldserver.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 1:33 PM
To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com
Subject: Re: OT: ebay sniping


> You are forgeting about one issue no matter how you might try to be 
> the last bidder it still may fail due to network and web application 
> (eBay web interface) latency, so it still ends up being very random as

> to predictability of timing. Your network path to eBay could be 
> swamped due to any number of issues including a DNS update to a 
> router.

Yes, network latency is significant and needs to be considered.
However, I was referring to ebay's own auto proxy bidding, which I
presume runs on the their server so latency is insignificant in that
case.

Third party autobidding software definitely has to contend with
unpredictable Internet latencies.

Dennis Leas
-------------------
dennis@mail.worldserver.com