Ping timeout?

[James Waldrop <sulam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, here's what I hope is an easy question.

We have what's basically a robot that runs the server-side logic of a
multi-user application built on top of IRC. We're seeing the robot get
timed out in a reproducible situation.

Specificaly, the robot sends and receives a lot of messages. When those
messages get to a certain point everything seems to "seize up" and no
more messages get through. This is not due to flooding, I have made the
buffers artificially large to make sure that's not the problem.

You can cause this to happen very easily. Login to IRC and send yourself
a line of text repeatedly (30-40) times. You have to have the flooding
tuned very high for this to work.

The first 10 or so messages come back relatively quickly, but after that
you can continue to send them and not get anything back from the server.
Eventually you may or may not see a PING, and even if you PONG back you
still get timed out.

Because we're getting timed out I've been assuming the problem is due to
a delay in handling the input queue, so I'm focusing my time there right
now. But I'd love some advice on where else to look, or if someone knows
what the problem is and how to fix it off the top of their head that'd
be great too.

James