Heartbeat Importance in Maintaining Application High-Availability

Factors for High-Availability Status Maintenance

Question

Heartbeats are used to maintain the high-availability status of an application.

Which factor is most important?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B. C. D.

C.

Link latency monitors the round-trip time of the CAPWAP heartbeat packets (echo request and response) from the access point to the controller and back.

This time can vary due to the network link speed and controller processing loads.

The access point timestamps the outgoing echo requests to the controller and the echo responses received from the controller.

The accesspoint sends this delta time to the controller as the system round-trip time.

The access point sends heartbeat packets to the controller at a default interval of 30 seconds.

Heartbeats are a mechanism used by applications to maintain high-availability status. Essentially, the application sends regular messages, or "heartbeats," to indicate that it is still running and available. These heartbeats are typically sent over the network, and the application uses the response to determine if the network is functioning properly.

The factor that is most important for heartbeats is the round-trip time (RTT). RTT is the time it takes for a packet to travel from the source to the destination and back again. For heartbeats, the RTT is critical because it determines how quickly the application can detect a failure and take action to recover from it.

If the RTT is too long, the application may not detect a failure quickly enough, and users may experience downtime or degraded performance. On the other hand, if the RTT is too short, the application may generate excessive network traffic, which can lead to congestion and performance problems.

Routing and bandwidth are also important factors for high-availability applications, but they are not as critical as the RTT. Routing determines the path that packets take through the network, and bandwidth determines the amount of data that can be transmitted at once. However, as long as the network is functioning properly, these factors should not have a significant impact on the performance of heartbeats.

Latency is a related concept to RTT, but it refers specifically to the time it takes for a packet to travel from the source to the destination. While latency can have an impact on the performance of heartbeats, it is not as important as the RTT, which takes into account the time for the response to travel back to the source.