[p4] Improve robustness on poor networks?

[Chris Weiss]

On 8/6/06, Chuck Karish <chuck.karish at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/1/06, Chris Weiss <chris.weiss at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> A simpler proxy solution than the one Arnt suggested might
> help.
>
> Set up a proxy at the remote site and do small syncs during off
> hours to keep the cache warm.  Syncs done from the remote
> site will get their fil contents from the proxy.  The proxy will
> hit the main server to retrieve metadata.  This can greatly
> reduce the bandwidth demands for syncs, especially if the
> files are large and if many users request the same files.
>
>
Unfortunately, that wont help us too much. Our changes day-to-day are
minimal, so the proxy is rarely more than a few kb of files behind.
The proxy still has to poll the main server for every file when doing
a sync to validate whether it's fresh or not, and thats where we run
into problems. Our connection can get so poor that even these polls
fail.

I'm rather suprised that there's no parameters for tweaking P4's
network behavior...
-- 
-Chris