discovery

[Ulf Wiger]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Jim Larson wrote:

>The only further thing I'd mention is that we found it useful to
>add the "-connect_all false" argument to the emulator's command-line
>invocation, to turn off the default behavior where each node in a
>distributed system sends heartbeat messages to all other nodes.
>For our application, only a single node really cares about the
>status of the others.

Yes, it is sometimes desireable to disable the connect_all feature.
Mainly, if you have a really large number of nodes.

Unfortunately, the global name registration is closely tied to the
connect_all feature (it shouldn't be, in my opinion). This means
that you must give up global name registration if you don't want
connect_all.

It would be nice to have more support for configuring systems with
a large number of nodes. One of the biggies is the global locker and
name registration facility. The current implementation doesn't scale.

At AXD 301, we have developed our own read-write locker, which does
handle large networks fairly well. It is also well tested. I've been
documenting it in order to release it as Open Source. Anyone
interested?

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger                                    tfn: +46  8 719 81 95
Network Architecture & Product Strategies    mob: +46 70 519 81 95
Ericsson Telecom AB,              Datacom Networks and IP Services
Varuvägen 9, Älvsjö,                    S-126 25 Stockholm, Sweden