[23704] in Hotline Meeting
Moira was slow today....
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Tue Aug 9 20:14:12 1994
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 94 20:13:54 EDT
From: tytso@MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
To: athena-outage@MIT.EDU
[ Apologies to those on accounts that get this twice; I mistyped the
email address for athena-outage the first time. --- Ted]
Some of you may have noticed that moira was occasionally very slow to
respond today. This was caused a bug in Ingres which was tickled by a
new set of moira clients which we had released the day before.
The bug in Ingres is that if you try to do a look up of an non-existent
8 character username, it would return instantly; however, if you tried
to lookup a non-existent username that was longer than 8 characters, it
would take 5-6 minutes, and tie up the moira server during that entire
time.
The change in the moira clients which made this problem extremely
visible was that when you create a list, it now checks to make sure that
the proposed new listname does not conflict with a user name. In order
to do this, it tries to lookup the username, and if it finds a username,
it will prompt to see if you really want to create a user with that
username.
The problem was that if someone tried to create a list longer than 8
characters, it would hang the server for 5-6 minutes, due to the
aforementioned Ingres bug. I've since fixed the moira clients to not
try to lookup a username if it's longer than 8 characters, both when
checking a prospective listname, and when looking up a user from the
user menu. So, this should fix the problem. These new clients have
been compiled and released tonight. (Thanks to Jonathon Weiss for
helping me do a rush job on recompiling and releasing the moira client
on all of our various platforms!)
My apologies for the inconvenience some of you may have suffered.
- Ted
