Brian Bockelman wrote:
On Sep 30, 2009, at 4:24 AM, Steve Loughran wrote:
Todd Lipcon wrote:
Yep, this is a common problem. The fix that Brian outlined helps a
lot, but
if you are *really* strapped for random bits, you'll still block.
This is
because even if you've set the random source, it still uses the real
/dev/random to grab a seed for the prng, at least on my system.
Is there anyway to test/timeout for this on startup and respond?
The amount of available entropy is recorded in this file:
/proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
That's the number of bytes available in the entropy pool. From what I
can see, 200 is considered a low number. It appears that the issue is
deep within Java's security stack. I'm not sure how easy it is to turn
it into non-blocking-I/O. If you've got a nice fat paid contract with
Sun, you might have a chance...
I could certainly do something to get that value and worry if it is low.
But where to add more.
Brian, you are the physicist, do you have any strongly random numbers
for us to use?
-steve
