ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (07/27/89)
In the latest V1.2 release, protos supports a new option that might be of general interest. In isis.rc you can now run protos with the argument -fxx, e.g. -f10 The number specifies a timeout (in seconds) on which we base our site failure detection scheme. By setting it low, (10 is quite low), ISIS can be made to react much more rapidly to site failures. This is ideal for demos, since your boss may not be impressed by a 3 minute pause while ISIS thinks about what to do next. On the other hand, you may want to set it high (60 is normal, 90 would be pretty high) in a setting with very sluggish machines. For example, one group that used ISIS on SUN 2/50's was constantly getting timeouts that killed those machines off. From the point of view of their day-to-day use of ISIS, slow timeouts were much to be preferred. Don't set the parameter below 5 or 10, or much above 90. Nothing would go particularly wrong, but the system would exhibit annoying behavior at either extreme. Ken Birman