On Sun Mar 6 23:50:48 EST 2011, lyn...@orthanc.ca wrote: > > He would get pretty exercised about keep-alives. Felt that it was not > > the business of TCP to make these kinds of decisions. I can't remember > > if he actually called them an abomination, but at the same time, one > > was left with the feeling that he might have. > > I'm sure he's called them worse than that over the years. And he could > not be more right. > > We have been inflicted with keepalives as a workaround to the only > worse abomination on the planet: shitty shitty shitty home NAT routers > that have a ten minute attention span.
oddly enough, il has always had a non-optional keepalive timer. however there are no (that i know of) application-level timers in plan 9. so when the file server went out to lunch for a 1 hr maintence window on the aoe hardware, everything hung and peacefully waited for the storage to reappear. when it did, it was as if nothing had happened. on linux, things would have gone quite sideways because there were outstanding requests to the storage and there are timers left right and center. though in this case there was nothing sensible to do but wait for the storage. rather than get on high horses, i think we should admit that timers are dangerous. not having timers can also be dangerous. in short, there's no winning. - erik
