Penguin

A system (in sport) whereby every team plays every other team in a nicely pre-arranged fashion.

In computing, the action of looking up a value and being given a list of things to try.

The canonical example is RoundRobin DNS:

$ host google.com
google.com has address 216.239.53.100
google.com has address 216.239.51.100

This is useful in the case that the first site might fall over, etc.

Another would be a RoundRobin Archive: a data structure that contains a pointer and N (eg 1000) spaces for data. Whenever you want to add a data item, you put the data item at the space pointed to by the pointer and increment it. If it gets to N, you set it back to 0 again. This way you can store exactly the last 1000 items of data with very little effort.

See also rrdtool and Cacti.