[p4] Improve robustness on poor networks?

[Arnt Gulbrandsen]

Chris Weiss writes:
> Our network's a bit spotty - if our pipe to the outside world gets 
> saturated, we start losing packets. This spells trouble for our 
> remote office as they'll be in the middle of a big sync and P4 will 
> throw a WSAE_TIMEOUT.
>
> Does anyone have any tips (outside of QoS) on ways to avoid P4 
> dropping connections so easily? We've already got a proxy server in 
> the remote office, but it still disconnects far too often due to 
> packet loss.

For a very modest fee, you can get a colocated server with fantastic 
bandwidth. Putting either the p4d or a p4p there might help. A p4p 
should be very easy to try out. Remote offices then use a local p4p 
which connects to the colo p4p, which in turn connects to your p4d, and 
the colo p4p is populated with new revisions by a small cron job which 
syncs a suitable dummy client every few minutes.

Arnt