Freeradius-Users Digest, Vol 62, Issue 96

[Alexandru Oprisan]

On 23.06.2010 10:07, freeradius-users-request at lists.freeradius.org wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 07:48:19PM +0300, Alexandru Oprisan wrote:
>> >       I'm using freeradius 2.1.6 on gentoo to do decoupled accounting.
>> >       I have everything set up, the only problem seems to be the speed of
>> >  the 'detail reader server'. I do quite a lot off accounting packets on
>> >  the box ( no auth ), the detail writer has already written 1.9G of
>> >  details ( in about 5 hours ) to hourly files, but the detail reader is
>> >  lagging far behind (still working on the first file). I only see about 1
>> >  row inserted per second, but I know the server can do far more.
>> >       I have set load-factor to 100, doesn't seem to help.
> The detail reader is serial in nature, meaning it will read a packet,
> transmit it, and wait for a response.  Upon receipt of an ack it will
> repeat for the next packet.  If you have any sort of latency on your
> link you can easily get heavily backlogged.
>
> We ended up implementing a proxy in between the detail file reader and
> the remote end; the proxy (a custom Perl script) transmits across
> several sockets, which the remote end seems to be able to deal with
> properly.  This has alleviated any backlog.
>
> I have grand plans to modify the reader to transmit non-serially, but so
> far have not had the tuits to apply to the problem.  I'm not sure I would
> recommend the proxy solution, but if you can manage it, it may be a
> reasonable stop-gap.
>

I have worked around the problem by compiling freeradius 2.1.7. I 
noticed in the release notes for 2.1.7 the following bug fix:
Allow detail file reader to be faster when "load_factor = 100"

It seems to work perfectly, the detail reader caught up with the detail 
writer in just a few hours.
The reason I had not compiled 2.1.7 previously is that it does not 
compile in gentoo ( using emerge ) unless you add the "threads" USE flag 
( which I didn't know )

Thanks for your answer.
Alex