cvsup server operation

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:01 AM -0500 10/10/03, Vladimir V Egorin wrote:
>We run updates (update.sh script) once per hour, however
>there are some clients that request updates periodically
>every 5-10 minutes, sometimes as often as every 2-3 minutes.
>This doesn't make any sense to me;

I agree it would not be good (or fair) for some cvs client
to consistently do.  However, I do occasionally do this from
my cvsup client.  I used to run cvsup once-per-week (by hand),
because I knew I wasn't going to do anything during the week.
Sometimes I'd skip a weekend or two, and by the time I did
run it there might be a lot of files that needed to be updated.

I found that lot of files would take a long time to update, and
the longer that *my* cvsup run took, the more likely that some
*new* updates would arrive on the cvsup-server while my update
was going on.  So, I would run cvsup again immediately after
the first one was finished.  Several times this tactic did save
me from getting a partial update (where someone commits several
files at once, but I only catch updates to half of those files).

There might also be cases where multiple machines are on the
other side of a NAT box from you.  In that case, I assume what
your server might see as multiple connections from one host
might really be separate hosts making a connection.  [that is
just a guess on my part though]

There are other situations where a single client might have a
legitimate reason to run two or three times in a short amount
of time.  If you do decide to add something to throttle the
clients that *constantly* contact the server every five minutes,
it would nice (IMO) if it didn't penalize someone who only
occasionally makes these repeated connections.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu