Zombie Clarification

Norman Elton normelton at gmail.com
Thu Mar 1 23:13:00 CET 2012


Just to make sure I know what's going on...

According to the docs, a server that does not respond to a request
within the response_window (default: 20 sec) is considered a "zombie",
and becomes eligible for the status checker. If no responses are
received within the zombie_period (default: 40 sec), it is marked
"dead". Once it's dead, it needs to respond to num_answers_to_alive
requests before being marked as "alive".

Assumign the zombie_period and check_interval are the defaults (40
sec, 30 sec), then the status checker would presumably run at least
once during the zombie_period and bring a server back to life before
it is marked dead.

So here's the question... If the FR server receives no requests, then
nothing gets forwarded to the home server. Does this scenario fall
under "does not respond to a request within the response_window"? That
is, should a quiet server constantly toggle in and out of zombie
state? If so, then "zombie" is not really indicative of a problem and
I can safely ignore the scenario.

Hopefully this makes sense, and is useful to anyone else burrowing
through the guts of the proxy status mechanism.

Thanks!

Norman Elton


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