[Libreoffice] Check for updates uses keep-alive / impacts the server (opengrok, tinderbox..)

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Pedro, *,

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Pedro <pedlino at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I hope you guys manage to fix this for RC1. Currently only the Beta version
> has this feature. Considering that only a small proportion of users are
> brave enough to try Betas and that Updates are only checked manually,

my beta3 defaults to having the weekly auto-check enabled.

> it is
> worrying that this can have an impact on the server...

Yes, because it runs out of open connections, not because it causes
high load. It causes the server to roll thumbs..

> IMO polling at intervals is also overkill (both for the user and for the
> servers).

The check itself is no challenge for the server at all, it can process
millions of those requests easily.

The problem is just this: Let's assume you have 3 cashiers, and 30
customers. you need  one minute to process a customer, thus with this
math you need 10 minutes for all of those. This is the "should-be"
case. But the "bad case" is that the 3 cashiers won't serve the next
customer unless the previous one did say "I'm done with shopping" as
the customer might bring another piece to buy, but never does so. It
reserves a timeslot of 10 minutes for each customer, each customer can
bring additional items within that 10 minutes (and if done so, the
slot extends to an additional 10 minutes). Yet every customer only
wants to buy one single item, with this setup dealing with those 30
customers takes 100 minutes.
And with the actual server the ratio is even worse - a request that
would take milliseconds is blown up to blocking a slot for 15 seconds
(the interval has been reduced on the server in the meantime, so that
all the beta users won't have a noticable impact on the server).

> LO should have an option to Check at startup or Check manually
> (which disables automatic checking)

Nah, I disagree, the options to check daily, weekly, monthly and only
manually are just fine.

As you wrote yourself - at startup can poll multiple times a day and
that doesn't really make sense.

And with the code in LO fixed to immediately signalling "I'm done
after this request" will solve the problem for good, the server will
handle those update requests with ease.

So thanks a lot Thorsten :-)

ciao
Christian