Re: {bb} bbgen 3.1 available

[Henrik Storner <henrik-bb@hswn.dk>]

Hi Kevin,

In <OFEA45AE40.0FF01708-ONCA256F1F.0004A21F@service.csv.au> Kevin.Pye@dhs.vic.gov.au writes:

[about bbproxy]

>Unfortunately we run multiple BB servers with failover, so we need to send 
>each message to multiple destinations, and bbproxy can only handle a 
>single destination as far as I can tell. 

That's correct.

I will probably add support for multiple destinations, since I need it
myself right now - I'm about to move my BBDISPLAY server to some newer
hardware, so it would be useful for a period of time to have two
systems running in parallel.

>The load distributing features of bbproxy are also interesting. We have a 
>large installation which is pushing the limits of BB on the servers we are 
>running it on and having particular problems when backups are running and 
>doing nasty things to the buffer cache.

It's quite useful for buffering messages during brief outages. My main
system that does status forwarding receives 20 messages/second, and
during a brief network hiccup yesterday the queue jumped from 50 to
250 messages. Obviously, it won't help you if something is permanently
overloaded, but it helps smooth out peak loads.

>Would you suggest running bbd on a non-standard port and then running
>bbproxy to forward all incoming messages on port 1984 to the port bbd
>is listening on?

You could do that, yes. I don't, but that is because my setup looks
like this:

    Internal network                    External network

     Client ---->  B                          B
                   B                          B
     Client ---->  N  ---->  BBDISPLAY <----- N
                   E                          E
     Client ---->  T                          T

So I run bbproxy on the BBNET servers, and let them do the
buffering. If you have a combined BBDISPLAY/BBNET server it could make
sense to do it the way you describe.

I have some ideas for a rewrite of the bbd daemon to make it handle
larger loads more elegantly - and as a side benefit, make it easier to
add custom modules e.g. to copy all of the messages into a database.

But don't hold your breath - that is going to take some time.


Henrik
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