Re: Network notifications

FROM : Jens Alfke
DATE : Tue Apr 01 18:05:19 2008

On 1 Apr '08, at 8:25 AM, Randall Meadows wrote:

>> If they're updating every second, then yes, TXT records would be 
>> inappropriate. But Randall didn't say whether the updates were that 
>> frequent.

>
> I would expect maybe 5-10 over a 2-3 minute period, and then a 
> downtime of about the same; lather, rinse, repeat for several hours 
> at a time.  Does that fall within some definition of "frequent"?


I'd say that's reasonable, if there won't be a lot of machines 
publishing this kind of stuff at once on the same subnet.

The only actual case I've seen where Bonjour traffic became a problem 
was on Apple's campus networks, after 10.2 shipped. That was a 
combination of very large subnets with hundreds of machines, most of 
them running iChat, and some inefficiencies in the original mDNS 
implementation that were then addressed in 10.3.

> Yes, currently in practice it'll probably be one-to-one, but I'm 
> writing for the future possibilities.


Using TXT records is still a lot easier than anything else you could 
do. In the spirit of "Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly 
Work",  try it this way first. If it causes any problems, you could re-
implement it using a TCP socket that the publisher sends notifications 
over, or something like that.

—Jens