Saturday, December 29, 2012

Decline of the PC

Many companies were caught off guard by the decline of PC usage, since Komodia's SDK is Windows based this affects me as well. I'm planning for two year now the "day after", when PC is no longer relevant or it's not economical to develop for it anymore. Some colleagues disagree with me and think that PC will be relevant even 3 years from now (the point I think it will die), who's right? I have no idea, all I do know that I have already rolled out a new product that is not tied to PC (URL Classification service).

What do you think?

Monday, July 30, 2012

WFP, LSP and reset drops

For the past few weeks I tried to hunt a bug with WFP, when using IE8 on Win7 some connections would not close when closing the IE8 via the close button and they were seen as orphaned connections.

I researched the matter and discovered that unlike FF and Chrome that closing the connections gracefully with FIN when they are closed, IE (or the OS) sends resets, and with the WFP some connections would not close.

I tore the WFP a new one, with many debug prints eventually I got to the conclusion that no resets were dropped, so I tested again without the WFP and discovered that some connections are not closed and after 30-60 seconds the server side closed them (and not the client side as it should), probably a bug of MS.

When using a LSP this didn't occur because when the LSP is unloaded it closes all the connections gracefully, so I added a function in the Komodia's Redirector to track closed apps and manually close all outstanding connections, this way connections are closed after a few seconds and not 30-60 seconds.