Frisbee heartbeats
Yesterday @stoller and I discussed and started working on a mechanism to allow us to better determine if frisbee clients are making progress. This has been a problem recently in particular with large (5GB) image-backed datasets which add considerably to the swapin time. It is hard to estimate in advance how long it will take to load a frisbee image.
Since this is a useful feature for frisbee independent of its use in Emulab, I added a heartbeat (status report) mechanism to the protocol. A client will periodically report to its server (unicast UDP message) how many chunks it has received and decompressed as well as how many bytes it has written to disk. The frisbee server (in the Emulab setting) will forward these, via events, to boss where a receiver will do Portal-ly things and make it all better for users (guess which part @stoller is doing?)