[Gajim-devel] blocking getaddrinfo

[Tomas Karasek]

Hi,

I'm trying to get rid of the GUI-blocking timeout that occurs on 
getaddrinfo() during connecting to XMPP server when network is down.

In such case, getaddrinfo blocks for quite a long time and roster window 
doesn't respond. It happens on connect after executing Gajim, and also 
when Gajim disconnects due to a network failiure and then tries to 
reconnect (and network is still down).

I was talking about that with Asterix and because we didn't find any 
AAAA-capable asynchronous python dns library, we came up with following:

Because SRV requests are done asynchronously via nslookup in pipe polled 
in IdleQueue (src/common/nslookup.py), it's possible to detect that DNS 
server is not available from result of asynchronous SRV request. And - 
if we know that DNS SRV request failed, then don't do the getaddrinfo call.
But now I found out that there is a short blocking timeout when closing 
pipe with running nslookup - on self.pipe.close(), so this is not a 
solution for GUI blocking on connect.

I already tried putting getaddrinfo to separate thread, but it just 
didn't work for me - the thread was waiting even after a successful gai 
call... As for dns libraries - adns can't do AAAA requests, pydns and 
dnspython can't operate asynchronously.

What I'm looking for is either
  - some elegant way how to do both A and AAAA requests asynchronously
    (like nonblocking getaddrinfo) which would be a nice solution
or
  - nonblocking detect that network is down which would allow to avoid
    needless call of getaddrinfo (temporary solution until some 
suitable 	   library appears)

Do you have any ideas/suggestions on this?

rgds,
tomk

-- 
Tomas Karasek

jabber: tom.to.the.k at jabber.cz
GSoC blog: http://tomk-soc08.blogspot.com/