speed of detail reader server

[Michael Fowler]

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.

--
Michael Fowler
www.shoebox.net