---
id: guides/rankings
title: Understanding Node Rankings & Routing
description: How bex router ranks and routes requests across underlying RPC nodes to keep requests fast and reliable.
keywords: [bex router, node ranking, rpc routing, reliability, uptime]
last_updated: 2026-08-19
---

Behind a single bex router endpoint sit multiple underlying RPC nodes per
chain. This guide covers how requests get routed to one of them, and how
that ranking is kept up to date.

## Why rank nodes at all

A single self-hosted node for a chain is a single point of failure: one
slow block, one dropped peer connection, and every request behind it slows
down or errors. bex router instead maintains a pool of nodes per chain and
continuously ranks them so a request lands on whichever node is healthiest
right now.

## What gets measured

Each node in the pool is scored on:

| Signal | What it catches |
|--------|------------------|
| **Response latency** | A node falling behind on request handling |
| **Sync status / block height** | A node lagging the chain tip (stale reads) |
| **Error rate** | Timeouts, malformed responses, connection resets |
| **Availability** | Whether the node answers health checks at all |

Scores are recomputed continuously — the ranking that decides where your
next request goes reflects node health from the last few seconds, not a
static snapshot.

## What this means for your requests

- **Automatic failover.** A node that starts erroring or falling behind
  drops in the ranking and stops receiving new requests; you don't see the
  failure, you see a request served by the next-healthiest node instead.
- **No pinning required.** You never need to track "which node am I on" or
  retry against a different one — routing to the best-ranked node happens
  on every request.
- **Consistent [compute unit](/docs/compute-unit) cost.** Which physical
  node served a request doesn't change what it costs — routing is an
  internal reliability mechanism, not a pricing tier.

## Related

- [Rate Limits & Quotas](/docs/rate-limits) — the limits that apply
  regardless of which node serves a request
- [Maximizing performance](/docs/maximizing-performance-a-guide-to-efficient-rpc-requests) —
  request patterns that pair well with this routing