DNS round robin resolving tests/questions

[Daniel Stenberg <daniel at haxx dot se>]

Hi glibc fellows!

I'm resolving host names with glibc 2.3.5 on Linux x86 (Debian unstable), 
using getaddrinfo() and gethostbyname(). The host names are "round robin" 
types in DNS, they resolve to a set of different IP addresses.

I'm experiencing differences in how the functions return the addresses, and 
I'm posting here to ask for guidance. Am I doing it wrong? Should I do 
something special to make getaddrinfo() return the addresses in a more 
"random" fashion?

Attached to this mail are two files:

 roundrobin.c - a stand alone test program for testing round robin DNS
 resolves (also at http://daniel.haxx.se/roundrobin.c)

 bad11-2000 - the output I got from running the test program with the
 arguments "bad11.haxx.s 2000". It makes the test program resolve that host
 name 2000 times and then check how the response addressess are distributed.
 (also at http://daniel.haxx.se/bad11-2000)

The bad11-2000 output clearly shows that gethostbyname() returns a more random 
list of addresses on my machine. Unfortunately, most of my getaddrinfo()- 
capable Linux hosts are all running Debian unstable so I can basically only 
test this on the same glibc. And I cannot detect any noticable differences 
between the hosts (they all use different /etc/resolv.conf files and different 
resolving servers for example).

Can anyone detect an obvious flaw in the test method or give a resonable 
explanation why this result could be considered OK?

Is there anything we mere mortals can do to improve the getaddrinfo() output 
without modifying glibc? I do realize I can "scramble" the resulting list 
myself, but I would find that awkward.

I'm not an expert on this, please point out my mistakes!

--
         -=- Daniel Stenberg -=- http://daniel.haxx.se -=-
  ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol

Attachment: roundrobin.c
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Attachment: bad11-2000
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