How do you know the latency of the path if you haven't synchronized the clocks...

You might be able to control the latency on a LAN, but once you have servers in different locations, good luck. (GPS helps a lot, of course...)

There is this command called 'ping' that tells you that. But in my example, I included the network topology as a known, static factor.

> There is this command called 'ping' that tells you that.

Ping tells you the round trip latency. As I mentioned, asymmetric routing is common and very difficult to measure.

> But in my example, I included the network topology as a known, static factor.

Ok, so spherical cows.