[kgb-maintainers] kgb-bot.deb and dropping RateLimit

[Damyan Ivanov]

-=| gregor herrmann, Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 02:29:35PM +0200 |=-
> On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:16:31 +0300, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
> > Next thing I am targetting is putting the thing in Debian. We 
> > shall not hide it any more. 
> 
> Yeah!
> 
> Please note that there is a kgb package in Debian ("Archiver for .kgb
> files"), so we should probably use a more specific name for our tool.

debian/control has 'kgb-bot' for both the source and binary package so 
technically we're OK. KGB came rather natural after CIA and FBI, and 
I am kind of attached to the name :) Also, it offers some non-US 
flavour I like (contrary to "DHS" for example). Additional points to 
consider before name change: KGB has gained some popularity in 
pkg-perl. Changing the Alioth project name is not feasible, I think.

(You'd notice the "like", "attached" and similar. They clearly state 
emotional arguments which are a matter of taste and therefore subject 
of discussion)

> > So I was wondering if we shall drop RateLimiter usage and return "I'm 
> > overloaded" SOAP error if the sending queue of the PoCo::IRC, whose 
> > size is available in the send_queue method, grows beyound (say) 15 
> > messages. Does this seem right to you?
> 
> Dropping additional dependencies is always nice, and I see nothing
> conceptually wrong with this proposal -- maybe we have to play with
> the value for the queue cutoff size a bit. 

There are two sizes: one is the message volume that is needed in order 
to create queue at all. This is not configurable in 
POE::Component::IRC except with subclassing. Subclassing is not so 
hard, but the comments in the code suggest the current implementation 
was tuned to some IRC daemon limitations. The other is the queue size 
at which we consider the bot overloaded. I took a rather low value 
(15) here as the limit built into PoCo::IRC is rather high. Sustained 
rate of (roughly) one 120-character message every 3 seconds seems 
quite OK to me.

OTOH, the main reason for this limit (after we have a guarantee not to 
overload IRC) is to avoid pending notifications to exhaust the 
available memory. So I guess 150 is not much more dangerous than 15 in 
this regard. And 15 may be too low in case of temporary IRC lag or the 
like.

Finally, the option will be configurable so the default will not be 
set in stone. (Which doesn't mean a sensible default is not to be 
provided :))

-- 
dam
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