Duncan Findlay wrote:
On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 08:56:45PM +1300, Jason Haar wrote:
If all SA users set sa-update to run hourly - then when an update comes
out, you will have *all* SA users contacting the same sites
simultaneously for the downloads. Owwwwch...
That's a good point. Those of us packaging SpamAssassin for
distributions should think about this. :-) Will it be okay if all
Debian users start running sa-update on the same minute of the hour?
Does the Debian package, unlike some other distros, enable network tests
by default? For distros that don't enable network tests, I'd imagine
their policy would be to not enable sa-update by default either (in
which case they could leave comments about picking some random minute to
run the updates in their example cron file, or since people are likely
to pick similar random times, tell them to run it a number of times an
hour -- see below).
For distros that enable sa-update by default my immediate thought is you
could do one of the following:
- somehow generate a random time for the cron entry... I have no idea
if this is even possible to do with the packaging systems in use
- have sa-update run *more often* than once an hour, the more often the
better the load distribution (with the current channel TTL of 1h,
load would be spread over the one hour period as each system would
become aware of a new update based on the time their system came up
and / or the time their name server cache was reset)... an ideal
interval would probably be around 5 minutes (enough time for even the
slowest connections to download an update before running again)
Daryl
