[hobbit] Hobbit Ping

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 05:06:05PM +1200, Alun Watson wrote:
>     Has anyone else noticed the ping times increase by a large amount as
> soon as you change from fping to hobbit ping?
> On our site ping times to clients were averaging 1.5m and now they are
> 29.9m. 

I haven't seen since my initial tests of hobbitping, and that was due to
a poorly chosen design for the packet handling. It has never been in one
of the hobbitping versions made available to you.

One explanation might be that hobbitping does behave differently from
fping. By default, fping pings each host 3 times, and reports the
average round-trip time as the result. hobbitping, on the other hand,
stops pinging a host as soon as it gets a response back, and reports the
round-trip time of just one ping. If this initial ping takes a long
time, e.g. due to an ARP request that needs to be performed, it could
affect the ping times you see.

Could you grab the latest snapshot, and in your hobbitserver.cfg set

   FPING="$BBHOME/bin/hobbitping --responses=3"

This will make hobbitping report the average round-trip time for 3
pings, like fping does. I would be interested to know if that helps,
and if it has any other consequences (like hosts being reported as
"down" when they are really up).


Regards,
Henrik