SUMMARY: NIS lethargy ?

From: Gerry Stringer (gerry@camscan.co.uk)
Date: Thu Jul 29 1993 - 21:34:00 CDT


The essentials of my original posting:

>>I've got some applications which use Tooltalk but the tt_open can take
>>almost 3 mins to start. On interrupting the process with dbx at the
>>slow point I find it is doing:
>> ....
>> clntudp_call()
>> v2domatch()
>> yp_match()
>> gethostbyaddr()
>> ....

Many thanks to all who responded, most of the responses suggested
things I'd already tried but it's easy to overlook the obvious so of
course I didn't mind.

The actual cause of the problem looks to be a bug. After reading
another totally unrelated manager's problem I tried etherfind and found
something suspect.

Doing:
  candy# etherfind -i le0 -r between electra candy

where electra is the m/c I ran the application from and candy is the
host from doing ypwhich ie. the one running ypserv serving electra

I then started the application and watched the etherfind report, I got
about 5 of the following requests (with long pauses in between):

 RPC Call ypserv Match V2 [2c60bc0c] domain YP.kitchen map
hosts.byaddr key len 11 49.57.50.46

and then eventually:

 RPC Call ypserv Match V2 [2c56c582] domain YP.kitchen map
hosts.byaddr key len 12 192.9.200.15

This last request matched OK and the tt_open finally succeeded. It
looks like the client is repeatedly trying to match with an invalid IP
no. In fact the, key length is 11 instead of 12 in the invalid request
so there may be some off by one error somewhere.

Having found something concrete I've been back to our friendly
workstation company. It doesn't appear to be a known problem but
manifests itself somewhere in:

   SUNOS 4.1.1 and 4.1.3
   OW3
   Tooltalk1.0 (with or without patchid 100626-04)

I have NOT tried this with Solaris2.x

Other investigations lead me to suspect the problem lies near the Tooltalk
end of things rather than ,say, the gethostbyaddr call internals.

In summary then, if you have an application which uses Tooltalk and it
seems to take a 'long' time to start up it may be this problem. I don't
know of any workrounds or patches at present.

Hope this is useful.

                gerry

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|Gerry Stringer |Phone: +44 954 780926 |
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