very chatty clients sent 28June2002

Robert Edwards Robert.Edwards at anu.edu.au
Fri Nov 1 09:27:02 EST 2002


On Fri, 1 Nov 2002 02:17 am, Tom Wike wrote:
> I wanted to share the comments from one of our NIS+ 'experts' on how
> RedHat's NIS+ client implementation is affecting our NIS+ servers, if we
> get more than a few hundered Linux NIS+ clients this could turn out to
> be a serious problem for our network.
>
> -Tom
>
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 08:12:34AM -0600, Chris Barrera wrote:
> > If the linux box is running as a nis+ client, and using the nis+
> > protocol to talk to a nis+ server, where does compat mode on the
> > server come into play? I am assuming one means NIS compat mode here.
> > Even assuming the NIS (not +) clients out there talking to the server
> > get more chattiness out of the server, the problems described appear
> > to be excessive chattiness on the linux nis+ client side.
> >
> > Specifically, I have noticed that each nis+ transaction a linux nis+
> > client wishes to make, causes it to send ~4 NIS+ RPC NULL PROC calls
> > to _each_ NIS+ server. This is for each nis+ transaction. There are
> > no similar behaviors seen for solaris clients.
> >
> > Looking over the NIS+ client code in glibc, it appears my eyes were
> > not deceiving me, there is a section of code designed to send out
> > N number of NIS+ RPC NULL PROC calls within a "for" loop.
> >

And herein lies the beauty of Open Source code - your expert can find the 
exact location in the source code of where the extra NULL PROC calls are 
coming from - all we need now is for him to send us a patch so that we can 
test out a fix on our NIS+ setups and confirm that this will reduce the 
chatter. As Linus Torvalds says (I believe it is him): "Show us the source, 
Luke". Then this "serious problem" goes away for you!

I still don't understand why anyone is running stuff in "compat" mode - isn't 
this just the same as plain old NIS/YP? Why would you bother running nisplus 
in compat mode?

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.



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