[bind10-dev] List of the statistics tasks which JPRS plans to work for in year 5

[JINMEI Tatuya / 神明達哉]

At Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:50:12 +0900 (JST),
Naoki Kambe <kambe at jprs.co.jp> wrote:

> Statistics tasks which JPRS is going to work for in year 5 are here:
> 
>  - for Auth module
>    #2156 Collect socket statistics items in Auth module
>    #2196 Update Auth to support differential statistics updates
>    #2796 Add a counter for queries with RD=1
>    #2797 Expand EDNS statistics counters for all versions
>    #2200 Collect per-zone query/response statistics items in Auth module
>    #2199 Add a configuration item to specify zones to collect statistics in Auth module
> 
>  - for Xfrin module
>    #2274 Implement counters into Xfrin (2/3)
>    #2300 Implement counters into Xfrin (3/3)
> 
>  Note: some tickets should be broken into small tickets.
> 
> So JPRS would like to ask you:
> 
>  - Are these enough for statistics work of year 5?

I'm afraid it's difficult to answer, but, in general, we can improve
the amount of collected statistics incrementally, so I personally have
no problem with any plans.

>  - If not enough, what are any other statistics tasks which we should
>    complete in year 5?

I believe we should first make some cleanups before considering any
extensions.  I created some tickets in this area: #2843, #2883, #2884,
#2781.  b10-stats is also generally not well tested (see #2781 for
example).  I also believe it needs some refactoring, e.g., by breaking
huge methods into manageable smaller ones (again, see #2781).  It's
also currently quite fragile, naively propagating/ignoring error cases
such as exceptions and die in a strange manner (see, e.g., #2636).

Other types of cleanups are:
- we should use 64-bit counters (I guess this will require changes to
  msgq/cc session data structures).  32 bits are too small in this
  modern world.
- how to handle parameterized counters, such as per RR type/class
  ones, and support them.

> What do you think about this? Could you give your opinion?

Statistics for the resolver, although it may not be of your interest:-)

> BTW, JPRS has currently the following technical problems about these
> statistics tasks.
> 
> Regarding #2156, we should resolve how to implement the socket
> counters into the asiolink or asiodns library. There doesn't seem to
> be any elegant way to do it.  Can this library be revised to implement
> such counters easily?

I think my previous question at
http://bind10.isc.org/ticket/2156#comment:6 still stands.  "because
JPRS's development plan requires that" doesn't seem to make much
sense; the real question is why people (or at least JPRS) need them.
In a followup discussion in the ticket, there's a comment about
possible usefulness of counting socket errors, and that's probably not
that tricky.

> Regarding #2200, auth needs to know a zone name for the query from the
> data source. But such a method doesn't seem to be implemented in the
> current zone manager.

This is related to a big open issue: how to manage zones in data
sources in general.  I hope we can solve it at some point in year 5.

---
JINMEI, Tatuya
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.