LambdaMOO Server Blocks on Connection

[Ryan Smith]

Hey All,

I've learned that the LambdaMOO server can block for up to 5 seconds when a new player connects to the server in order to resolve the IP address into a hostname. This comes from the LambdaMOO programmer manual:

When the server first accepts a new, incoming network connection, it is given the low-level network address of computer on the other end. It immediately attempts to convert this address into the human-readable host name that will be entered in the server log and returned by the connection_name() function. This conversion can, for the TCP/IP networking configurations, involve a certain amount of communication with remote name servers, which can take quite a long time and/or fail entirely. While the server is doing this conversion, it is not doing anything else at all; in particular, it it not responding to user commands or executing MOO tasks.
By default, the server will wait no more than 5 seconds for such a name lookup to succeed; after that, it behaves as if the conversion had failed, using instead a printable representation of the low-level address. If the property name_lookup_timeout exists on $server_options and has an integer as its value, that integer is used instead as the timeout interval.

Can anyone chime in on this? Has anyone set name_lookup_timeout to 0 and noticed improvements on very high traffic MOOs? Do we really expect this resolving to "take quite a long time?" (especially since this isn't the 1990's).

Best,

Ryan

[the Prometheus Support]

Hello!

I tried this on a database, and the result was that after setting
$server_options.name_lookup_timeout to 0, the server now catches the
IP's of the incoming connections and does not even attempt to resolve
hostnames.

--
Cheers,
Con