Socket errors

[Ethan Blanton]

Billy Crook spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > One instant reconnect would be harmful, say, when your corporate XMPP
> > server goes down, and can't get back up because all 5 thousand clients
> > are trying to re-connect simultaneously, essentially DOSing it.
> 
> Valid point, but any backoff will only mitigate this to a point.  In
> the end, servers have to be resistant to DDoS whether malicious or
> not.

... that doesn't mean we should intentionally create one, and that
line of logic is deeply flawed.  :-P

Ethan

> > If you're actively using the client, you can manually reconnect
> > immediately, while all the people who are away and don't care about
> > re-connecting don't DDOS the server.
> 
> When I read that I heard "If Status=Avaliable; try immediate reconnect"

That's not a good heuristic -- many users (myself included) have an
available status all of the time; it is my sense that *more* users
have an away status all of the time.  There are other ways to detect
user presence, but instantaneous reconnects are a bad enough idea for
other reasons that this is a moot point.

Ethan

-- 
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws [that have no remedy
for evils].  They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor
determined to commit crimes.
		-- Cesare Beccaria, "On Crimes and Punishments", 1764
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