This document describes the practical aspects of the bake-off. It deals with the scheduled dates and times, locations and hardware and software specifications. Details on general rules (including the rules for running experiments), the experiments that will be performed and the presentation format can be found in corresponding parts of the documentation.

2. Dates

The bake-off will be conducted over a three day period :

• March 15th, 1999 - March 17th, 1999
• Between the hours of 8am and 8pm each day.

A venue for the bake-off has been generously provided by Paul Vixie of Vixie Enterprises.

Vixie Enterprises
950 Charter Street
Redwood City, California, 94063
USA

The venue is a large unheated warehouse, so please bring some warm clothing.

4. Hardware

The hardware for the experiments will be Intel based Personal Computers.

Individual Machines

• Intel Pentium II 266MHz processor (or faster)
• 256MB of RAM
• 3.2GB Hard Drives (or larger)
• 100BaseTX interface cards

A single testing cluster will cost a participant $5000. To increase the size of the cluster by one client and one server will cost an additional $1000. At the request of a participant one Alteon ethernet switch will be provided at no additional cost.

Testing Clusters

• Two machines acting as a Polygraph Clients.
• Two machines acting as a Polygraph Servers.

All testing systems will be running FreeBSD (2.2.7-RELEASE). With the testing done using Web Polygraph version 1.x.

FreeBSD Configuration

• Increase max memory parameters in kernel config file

  options         "MAXDSIZ=(512*1024*1024)"
  options         "DFLDSIZ=(128*1024*1024)"
  

• Increase max mbuf clusters in kernel config file

  options         "NMBCLUSTERS=40960"
  

• Disable TCP delayed Acks in kernel config file

  options         TCP_ACK_HACK
  

• Increase max file descriptors in /sys/conf/param.c

  #define MAXFILES (16384)
  int     maxfilesperproc = 12288;
  

• Decrease MSL to 3 seconds in /usr/src/sys/netinet/tcp_timer.h

  #define TCPTV_MSL       ( 3*PR_SLOWHZ)          /* max seg lifetime (hah!) */
  

• Apply mbuf size patch to /usr/src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c

  ===================================================================
  RCS file: /home/ncvs/src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c,v
  retrieving revision 1.40
  retrieving revision 1.41
  diff -p -u -r1.40 -r1.41
  --- src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c  1998/05/15 20:11:30     1.40
  +++ /home/ncvs/src/sys/kern/uipc_socket.c       1998/07/06 19:27:14     1.41
  @@ -491,6 +491,7 @@ restart:
                                  mlen = MCLBYTES;
                                  len = min(min(mlen, resid), space);
                          } else {
  +                               atomic = 1;
   nopages:
                                  len = min(min(mlen, resid), space);
                                  /*
  

• Increase ephemeral port range

  	/usr/sbin/sysctl -w net.inet.ip.portrange.last=30000
  

• Increase SOMAXCONN

  	/usr/sbin/sysctl -w kern.somaxconn=1024
  

• Set limits in /etc/login.conf

  default:\
          :cputime=infinity:\
          :datasize-cur=infinity:\
          :stacksize-cur=infinity:\
          :memorylocked-cur=infinity:\
          :memoryuse-cur=infinity:\
          :filesize=infinity:\
          :coredumpsize=infinity:\
          :maxproc-cur=infinity:\
          :openfiles-cur=infinity:\
          :openfiles-max=12288:\
          :priority=0:\
          :requirehome@:\
          :umask=022:\
          :tc=auth-defaults:
  

• Disable cron
• Disable inetd