SCIONLab beaconing frequency changed in core ASes, does it improve path stability?

[Juan A. Garcia Pardo]

Hello everyone,

We have observed for quite some time now that the core ASes nodes would have their beacon servers using 100% of CPU. This, we assumed, would cause issues also revoking interfaces, due to some beacon servers being unable to send their IFIDs on time.

We decided today to lower the beaconing frequency of all the core ASes, from 5 seconds to 60 seconds.

For reference, the modified nodes are these ones:

as42-1, as42-2, as42-3, as42-4, as42-5, as42-6, as42-6-brs, as42-7, as42-8, 

as1-11, as1-11-br5, as1-11-br6_8_11, as1-11-br7, as1-11-br9_10

as2-21-brs, as2-21-bs-cs-ps-zk, as3-31, as4-41, as6-61, as7-71

The tests show immediate improvement in the two variables we thought it would improve: CPU usage in the nodes and path stability.

This should show up for anybody using SCIONLab as well. Please if you experience issues, in particular if these issues are new and didn't show up before, notify me (Juan) and we'll either fix it or roll back the changes.

Many thanks and best regards,

Juan A.