Re: [Sks-devel] SKS RAM usage gone haywire

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

On 02/15/2009 06:33 PM, Ryan wrote:
> Yea, I am pretty sure I am the one going haywire.. sorry guys, trying to
> figure out exactly what the hell is wrong...

Thanks for the quick and excellent detective work, Phil and Ryan!  Since
i restarted sks on zimmermann.mayfirst.org, and Ryan took his system
offline, zimmermann.mayfirst.org's sks recon process is now fluctuating
in RAM usage, but holding well below 20MB (not climbing anywhere close
to 3G!)

> it looks like I was going through my peers and requesting the same set
> of keys in an endless loop... We can all agree thats bad behavior,
> however my poor peers should have never leaked memory like that as my
> server was cycling the requests through all the peers with about 120
> seconds between each request..

I agree with Ryan here that even if his host *had* been compromised and
doing what amounts to a gossip DoS attack, the other nodes in the
network should not have tried to gobble up all the RAM on their
respective systems.  We should not need to fully trust our peers in the
SKS network to run a public keyserver.

Alas, i'm swamped on time right now (and also don't know ocaml), so
about the only thing i can offer for debugging is to set hard RAM limits
on the sks processes zimmermann.mayfirst.org and report back on how the
tool deals with hard RAM exhaustion.  If there's any particular data i
should gather in that case, please let me know and i'll try to gather it
and report back.

Regards,

        --dkg

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