XInetd

[Bill Farrell <billfarr ages com>]

Hi Everyone:

I'm wondering about xinetd for RH7.  I just recently bought and installed
RH7 (the Pro version) and installed it on a machine that was previously
running RH6.2.

After a wee while with the editor rearranging paths (since /etc now has a
lot of configs in subdirectories) it looked great and I thought I was about
ready to put it into service.  I really like the new organisation of
configs...being in subdirectories, one can easily document-as-you-go.

Then I noticed something weird.  I had two machines, one next to the other
and even next to one another in the network hub.  From the RH6.2 machine to
the RH7 machine, pings were running about the expected 0.5ms mark.  Pings
from RH7 to the RH6.2 machine were running around 300-500ms.  Telnet also
took an exhorbitant time to connect and performed lackadaisically, even with
one user connected (me).

Of course, I'm not at all familiar with the new xinetd and wonder if there's
a tuning issue involved.

All 20-some of my servers are using a DEC RLT8139-based NIC (which RH seems
to love).  I wound up taking that particular server BACK to 6.2 where it
performs up-to-snuff.  All the network-related problems disappeared.

I haven't seen any benches or mentions of xinetd performance as opposed to
inetd performance.  RH7 stays on the shelf until I can figure out why xinetd
performs so awfully.

I'm serving some 40,000,000 hits a week and each server has to be
johnny-on-the-spot, tuned and performing well.  Until I get more information
I'm having to consider RH7.0 a Bad Idea(tm), but I don't want to get so far
behind or releases I wind up in Never-Catch-Up Land.  Has anyone else got an
idea of why the two releases perform network functions so differently?  Any
tuning suggestions?  Any ideas?

Best regards,
Bill