From: gwtmp01@...
Date: 2005-07-17T23:57:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Cheapest ping possible


On Jul 17, 2005, at 9:26 AM, Matthew Margolis wrote:
> I have a client/server application that I am currently developing  
> that requires the server to ping all clients once every five  
> minutes or so to verify that the clients are up and active.  The  
> business server machine we have at our disposal is a pretty low end  
> linux box and there is eventually going to be several thousand  
> clients.  How would all you smart people out there reccomend I do  
> the pinging?  It needs to be very easy on the server and as fast as  
> it can be.  If the company has 2000 of their employees use the  
> system then I have to ping 7 clients a second.  Threading of some  
> sort seems like a must as nonconcurrent pinging seems like it would  
> take forever if there were lots of timeouts.
> The only requirements are that I am able to get a ping time for  
> each client.  It doesn't really matter what sort of data I am  
> sending around.
> I know about ruby ping (http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/ping/ 
> rdoc/index.html).  Has anyone used this library for a lot of  
> concurrent pings?  Are there any better solutions out there for  
> what I need?

Have you thought about using something like Nagios? http:// 
www.nagios.org/

This is an open source monitoring system.  It will archive data, graph
availability, page people on escalation lists and so on.




Gary Wright