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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 27.05.09 09:49, Daniel Wynne (daniel.wynne at mobotix.com) wrote:

> > > 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. 
> > 
> > D-Bus "congestion"? I don't think that exists. What exactly makes you
> > think D-Bus could be 'congested'?
> 
> So this was a misunderstanding, sorry. In a previous thread somebody
> mentioned that every D-Bus client can have at maximum 250 objects. I
> assumed that every resolver browser is a client's object. If this is
> correct, the limitation is forced by Avahi and not the D-Bus system.

Yes. That is true. For security reasons Avahi enforces limits on all
resources a local or remote client can allocate and control. 

> > This might have to do something with the internal limits Avahi applies
> > on almost everything: in this case possibly the size of the chache?
> > 
> > Also note that if you issue a lot of requests the local IP stack
> > packet queueing might already drop packets. Lost packets will most
> > likely result in timeouts.
> 
> Is there an easy way to verify this? Could not find any proper
> logfile.

Edit avahi-core.c and the function avahi_cache_update(). Look for these
line: 

if (c->n_entries >= AVAHI_CACHE_ENTRIES_MAX)
   return;

Then add a log line there that prints something when an entry is not
added to the cache because it reached its max size. i.e.

if (c->n_entries >= AVAHI_CACHE_ENTRIES_MAX) {
    avahi_log_debug("cache: overrun");
    return;
}

or something like that. Then run avahi-daemon --debug to get a peek on
the debug output.

> > The max cache size is controlled via AVAHI_CACHE_ENTRIES_MAX in
> > avahi-core/cache. It is set to 500. Given the number of hosts this
> > might actually be way to low for your use case. Try to increase it to
> > 5000.
> 
> This solution is not really applicable since it requires recompiling
> the sources.

It's free software. Sources available. 

> Is there a way to cleanly free the browser resolvers immediately?

No.

But this 'recycling' of resolves/browsers shouldn't hurt in your case.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4