[avahi] Resolving many ( > 200 ) items seems to lead to apparent congestion in the dbus

[Daniel Wynne]

I would like to attach some Information to my previous posting.
Another issue is, that on startup we have to restart the avahi service.
Otherwise we startup with only about 5-6 found services.



On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 08:10 +0200, Daniel Wynne wrote:
> Lennart Poettering schrieb:
> > On Fri, 15.05.09 10:17, Daniel Wynne (daniel.wynne at mobotix.com) wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> Hi All!
> >>
> >> Since we sometimes deal with more than 250 hosts, we often run into
> >> timeouts from the Resolvers. For now, we immediately try again until all
> >> Hosts are resolved. This can take up to 10 mins...
> >>
> >> After restarting the application we end up resolving only about 50% of
> >> the hosts. A restart of the dbus allows the application to find all
> >> hosts again.
> >>
> >> Is there a knwon issue about the dbus system that "free"-ed items remain
> >> for an amount of time? Is there an easy workaround for this? 
> >> Do you think it would be good practice to establish an queue system to
> >> avoid the resolver-timeouts?
> >>     
> >
> > How are you using this? Are you resolving 250 hosts one after the
> > other?
> >
> > Avahi enforces limits at all places, i.e. on the cache, timeouts,
> > queries sent out and so on, to make sure we don't flood the network,
> > and that Avahi cannot be used for a DoS attack. 
> >
> > mDNS is intended to be used in smaller networks, up to 200 hosts or
> > something like that. I.e. small offices, homes. If you have larger
> > networks than that mDNS is not the protocol you should be using.
> >
> > Lennart
> >
> >   
> Hi Lennart!
> 
> Though its not the standard case, we deal with more than 250 hosts for 
> testing purpose. We want to resolve all of them, either without spamming 
> the DBus-System or crash into any Avahi-limitation.
> First, we tried resolving everything right on the way, but this lead to 
> apparent DBus-congestion, which could only be solved by restarting the 
> whole service. After that we tried a queued system which allows only a 
> few resolvers to be coexistent, but this did not lead to any perceptible 
> improvement. The DBus still seems to be congested after a short while. 
> Only a restart of the service solves the problem. Without deep insight I 
> would assume, that the DBus-objects created are not freed-up cleanly or 
> lets say immediately. They seem to remain and so the bus gets filled-up.
> To give you a more detailed overview I explain to you what exactly happens:
> - We browse the .local domain for HTTP and HTTPS services with two 
> coexistent browsers
> - For every resolver we create, we create another one to receive 
> additional address records
> - The first resolver is freed immediately after resolving, the second 
> after the last address has been resolved
> - This works fins for about 100 Hosts, then it starts to stumble. The 
> other resolvers achieve timeouts. If a timeout occurs we trie to resolve 
> again.
> - After about 1min we receive another circa 50 hosts before the next 
> stumbling
> - Then about every 1-2 minutes we receive a variable amount of hosts
> We also tried a queued algorithm with only a certain amount of 
> coexistent resolvers without a noticeable improvement.
> 
> As you have a now a litlle more detailed view on what we do, could you 
> please give us some hints on how to improve the use of Avahi?
> Maybe its not an DBus but an Avahi issue?
> What are the exact limits of Avahi concerning cache, timeouts queries, 
> etc...?
> How does the free-mechanism work exactly, especially on the DBus-side?
> 
> Thanx again!
> 
> Daniel
> 
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