Testing: Epilogue to Chapter 1
Outside the delightful task of cleaning and organizing our basement, this weekend offered some prime coding time - and I spent it chewing through a new and improved Deacon+Meteor test suite.
Unfortunately, the results have been more cause for confusion than celebration. The new suite uses a pair of dedicated machines - one server, one client - on an isolated network with PTP-synchronized clocks and a socket-based side channel for control. It successfully addresses the error introduced by including push send time in the round-trip duration, but exposes many more weaknesses in my previous tests.
While I didn't seem to encounter this limit before, I'm now having great difficulty getting either the client or server machines past 1,024 connections - an upper-bound imposed by Linux's per-process file descriptor limit. This limit is configurable, but still seems to be leading me on a merry chase. I also discovered that the previous test didn't account for Deacon instances that weren't actually connected to the server - so I've added some extra accessors and state tracking to Deacon to prevent the test from advancing before all the clients are ready.
I'm still making progress - so stay tuned and hopefully I'll have some better news to share soon. In the mean time, suggestions are always welcome via the comments or mailing list...
