The following is the result of my own experiments, performed when a) I started noticing that my remailing times didn't seem to match the ping lists available and b) another local guy posted a format that seemed useful, so I swiped it. I mailed through each of the remailers listed below ten times over the course of eight days (10 Jan 96 to 18 Jan 96) - posts went out spread across all hours of the day and night, to compensate for congestion at high-traffic times. (Insomnia's value as a research aid, coming soon to a major scientific journal.) Each post went through the remailer, to a nym server, back through the remailer, and then to me. The trip time is the interval from the end of a posting session with Eudora and PPP connection to Teleport to the arrival of a message in my mailbox at Teleport. Times are given in hours and minutes. "Failure" means that I hadn't gotten a reply back within four days of posting it. I anticipate doing this on a monthly basis, and would be delighted to hear from anyone else doing the same. Joel McNamara has raised the possibility of a net resource that would feed back the data for whatever region is closet to the inquirer, which sounds seriously cool to me. REMAILER PERFORMANCE, MID-JANUARY FAILURES REMAILER AVG MIN MAX NOTES 0 hroller@c2.org 00:05 00:02 00:18 0 homer@rahul.net 00:06 00:03 00:14 0 hfinny@shell.portal.com 00:08 00:02 00:38 0 remailer@armadillo.com 00:09 00:06 00:12 0 hal@alumni.caltech.edu 00:09 00:02 00:24 0 remailer@utopia.hacktic.nl 00:19 00:03 01:20 0 mixmaster@vishnu.alias.net 00:56 00:23 02:38 0 remailer@valhalla.phoenix.net 01:35 00:20 05:49 0 mixmaster@remail.obscura.com 02:36 00:23 06:55 0 remailer@bi-node.zerberus.de 07:43 00:15 19:54 1 remailer@replay.com 00:31 00:13 01:14 2 remail@c2.org 00:52 00:14 03:00 8 remailer@extropia.wimsey.com 01:46 01:19 02:13 [1] 8 mix@remail.gondolin.org 11:17 03:58 18:36 10 amnesia@chardos.connix.com ? ? ? [1] On the 19th or 20th, extropia.wimsey.com suddenly cleared backlog, and all my messages did go through. So I'll see how it does in February; looks like they had a week-long weirdness of some kind. Comments welcome. Bruce Baugh bruceab@teleport.com http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab