5. The "Weight" field

   Weight, the load balancing field, is not quite satisfactory, but the
   actual load on typical servers changes much too quickly to be kept
   around in DNS caches.  It seems to the authors that offering
   administrators a way to say "this machine is three times as fast as
   that one" is the best that can practically be done.

   The only way the authors can see of getting a "better" load figure is
   asking a separate server when the client selects a server and
   contacts it.  For short-lived services like SMTP an extra step in the
   connection establishment seems too expensive, and for long-lived
   services like telnet, the load figure may well be thrown off a minute
   after the connection is established when someone else starts or
   finishes a heavy job.