Re: oafd lifecycle

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On 16 Jul 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> We have a problem with "lingering oafd" at the moment. Imagine a large
> multiuser system; you'll quickly have 300 oafd floating around.
>
> gconfd exits after a timeout of 5 minutes or something if it has no
> active clients. The timeout is to avoid churn if I write a loop that
> uses gconfd, and I'm the only client.
>
> For oafd I think we should exit immediately if there are no servers
> oafd knows about. A timeout should not be needed, since I don't think
> it would be typical to get/release a single server over and over.  If
> there is a timeout it should likely be short, maybe 1 minute or so.

There needs to be a short timeout (10-15s) just to handle the possible -
even 1 minute is maybe too long. As long as the capability is there,
figuring out the right timeout based on guesses & experience will be
relatively easy.

May also need to be able to turn off the timeout-exit - I think it may
have some implications for networked oafd's.

Also, a timeout does not distinguish between oafd-as-objectdirectory
(which needs to timeout), oafd-as-activationcontext (which needs to die
with the session), and oafd-as-both (the lifetime of which is uncertain).

-- Elliot
Your freedom to change my source code does not translate into my
responsibility to foist your changes upon users at large.