Re: [Sks-devel] Request for SKS gossip peers

[John Clizbe]

Andreas Thulin wrote:
> My bad, I sent my e-mail to the wrong receiver...
> 
> Also, a correction: I'm running sks version 1.1.3.
> 
> Please see below.
> 
> /A
> 
> 2012/9/9 Andreas Thulin <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>>
> 
>     Hi!
> 
>     I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 (64 bit) on an Asrock Ion 3D
>     
> (http://www.asrock.com/nettop/overview.asp?Model=ION%203D%20Series#Specifications),
>     2Gb RAM.
> 
>     SKS version 1.1
>     Berkeley version: ? - How do I find out?
> 
>     I'm running a fastbuild (n=1), which seemed to work for a qouple of
>     minutes, but then it looked like it stopped.
> 
>     Running
>     # strace -p processID
>     first gave a lot of reads, but then has produced nothing but
> 
>     futex(0x7f0c1db15358, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL
> 
>     the last 10 hours.
> 
>     The funny thing is that something writes to the /sks/DB directory every
>     now and then. It seems to happen each time I run strace, but also at other
>     times. I'm thinking maybe the "n=1" thing makes this fastbuild very slow,
>     and the process hence should take several hours still.

For a variety of reasons mostly personal, I have never used fastbuild only
build. n for fastbuild is the multiple of 15000 keys to load on a single pass,
For build, n is the number of key files to read in per pass. Depending on
which keydump you are using, the two may effectively be the same as 15000 is
the default number of keys to dump per file. I use n=14 (210000 keys) on my
gingerbear machine which is the same hardware as the Windows XP box mentioned
below, it runs Slackware-current.

In /etc/sks, you should have a file named sksconf. Add the following two lines

pagesize:       128
ptree_pagesize: 8

The default value for pagesize is 4 (2048 bytes) and for PTree it's 1 (512
bytes). Experience has shown these to be too low. The defaults are adjusted in
the trunk version.

Make that change, stop the (fast)build. Delete any directories in /var/sks/lib
and try again. I'd use something like:

sks build -n 12 -cache 100 /var/sks/dump/*.pgp

or similar or use the build script that ships with Debian.

>     What amount of time should I expect this to take?

I last built a SKS database on a Windows XP box (Athlon XP 2800+, 2.13GHz; 2GB
RAM, PATA/133 drives) back on 25 July. Times were

build:  4:18:39.734
clean:  0:03:31.031
pbuild: 1:12:11.641

That was a build with n=5. n is adjusted on each machine to a value that does
not cause swapping to occur. build depends more on the speed of your disks
than anything else.

>     Running this DB build with some sort of human readable periodic progress
>     indication is of course preferrable.

When I run build, I get the output like:

Build
Wed, Jul 25, 2012  1:15:51 AM
Loading keys...done
DB time:  2.95 min.  Total time: 4.74 min.
Loading keys...done
DB time:  4.88 min.  Total time: 6.74 min.
Loading keys...done
DB time:  3.69 min.  Total time: 5.28 min.
Loading keys...done
DB time:  3.78 min.  Total time: 5.29 min.
Loading keys...done
etc...

The first two lines are from my build script. clean and pbuild both have their
own log files that you can follow with 'tail -f'. clean.log tells you what
actions it is performing. pbuild.log spits out a timestamp every 5000 hashes
it processes.

>     Thanks all for helpful pointers! :-)

No problem. You're welcome.

>     Best regards,
>     Andreas

Good luck.
-John
-- 

John P. Clizbe                      Inet: John (a) Gingerbear DAWT net
SKS/Enigmail/PGP-EKP                  or: John ( @ ) Enigmail DAWT net
FSF Assoc #995 / FSFE Fellow #1797  hkp://keyserver.gingerbear.net  or
     mailto:address@hidden

Q:"Just how do the residents of Haiku, Hawai'i hold conversations?"
A:"An odd melody / island voices on the winds / surplus of vowels"

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