On Jun 3,  3:12pm, S.J. Borrill wrote:
> Subject: BOOTP
> I've been giving BOOTP a hammering on RiscBSD. I have 20 clients
> attempting to boot simultaneously. Upon failing, they retransmit at the
> interval.  This means that there are 20 bootp broadcasts at once each time
> (the less said about the lack of backing off as per rfc0951 the better,
> grrrr.).  Basically what happens is that bootpd takes up about 15% of CPU
> time, but forces the time spent in system up to the 90% mark. Doing a
> bootpd -d 10 (to force debug mode) claims replies are being sent. The
> upshot of which no machines boot (or rather if they do, they seem to do it
> one by one). If the machines are switched on at 5 second intervals they
> all boot up fine.
>
> So my question is: Why does bootpd and/or the kernel cope so badly with
> such a situation?

It would help to know what hardware you're running your server on. Have you
tried running tcpdump on another box on the network to monitor what is going
on?

Unfortunately we don't have enough machines to duplicate your setup and
reproduce the problem ;-)

Cheers

Rob