3.1.1 Failover Speed (was: Re: 4.1.0a1 Failover sync speed)

[Michael Kaegler]

Up until now, we've had static assignments for every machine in our 
network. Having multiple servers in this environment without failover 
was fine.

Now that we're moving to pools, we're needing to configure failover, 
so we've been testing failover with different dhcpd releases on test 
servers.

3.1.1 with out configuration takes 2.5 hours.
4.0.0 takes 1.5 hours.
4.1.0a1 takes 4 hours.

These are all way too long for us to keep dhcp unavailable for (for 
the initial sync). I'm also worried about working problems and having 
to restart this 4-hour process as part of the debug steps!

We do have 140 subnets (mostly /21s). The load averages on the test 
servers were high (4.00 - 6.00) but the interfaces were only pushing 
60kbit.

Chuck Anderson asked if we had excluded all the fixed address 
assignments (before we had tested with a version other than 4.1.0a1) 
and the answer is 'no'. The subnets have pool ranges which span most 
of the (/21) subnet. There are fixed-address lines within those 
ranges which will be removed (but can't be yet, we still need them).

Why is this not faster? Whats happening other than transferring data? 
Can I speed up the initial sync somehow?
TIA,
-porkchop
-- 
Michael "Porkchop" Kaegler, Sr. Network Analyst
(845) 575-3061 Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY