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Re: Last Call: draft-lawrence-sipforum-user-agent-config (Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) User Agent Configuration) to Informational RFC

2010-04-19 11:25:32

On Apr 6, 2010, at 16:47 , Bernard Aboba wrote:

Hadriel Kaplan said:
 
“Howdy, 
This may not be within the normal rules of etiquette, but I will re-iterate 
my issues with this draft which I raised when it was discussed in RAI. 
 
1) The mechanism does not scale, for large SSP's. (is this only meant for 
small deployments?)  
 
Expecting every UA to keep a permanent SIP Subscription to "config change" 
servers is unreasonable. Either the UA makes this Subscription directly to 
the Server(s), in which case there will be a large volume of keep-alives just 
to keep NAT pinholes alive; or it makes it through edge proxies, in which 
case it's a lot of SIP messaging both in the sense of keeping the Subscribe 
dialog alive but more importantly at the worst possible time: during 
avalanche restarts. Either way, it's not good. 
 
All this state and signaling is to achieve what? So that once a year or so we 
can tell UA's to do another HTTP Get so they change one of their config 
settings, or upgrade their firmware?? How is that cost-burden justified? Do 
most other applications keep permanent connections for such changes? Not as 
far as I can tell. They poll on a (very) infrequent interval. 
 
2) I would be ok with (1) if it was optional, so only providers that wanted 
it had to pay for it, but as far as I can tell the mechanism *requires* 
implementation of this SIP Subscription service. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? 
Section 2.5.1 says the HTTP response MUST have the Link header, with a SIP 
URI, and if the Subscription attempt fails then it has to start again, etc. 
Seems to me you're requiring/mandating a "nice-to-have-feature", and an 
expensive and complicated one at that. Why? 
 
-hadriel ”
 
[BA] I agree with your assessment.  This is one of those situations where 
(infrequent) polling scales better.   That is how currently most OS update 
mechanisms work;  they poll the update servers at intervals orders of 
magnitude longer than NAT refresh times (e.g. weekly or daily at most), with 
randomized polling times.  That way there is no need to maintain NAT 
bindings, and no danger of “flash crowds”.   Yes, it might take a while to 
bring all the clients up to the latest version, but if you’ve got any 
substantial client population, then you need to spread out the updates anyway 
to control the load on the update servers.
 

So there are somethings like upgrading the software firmware on phones where a 
slow roll over makes sense, however there are other things like moving from a 4 
digit to 5 digit internal dialing plan where you want to flash cut over all the 
phones at a given site. Can you imagine telling a site, uh, your phone will 
switch from 4 to 5 digit dialing some time in the next few days - if 4 digit 
stops working, try 5 digits and see if that works. That the sort of think that 
generates support calls that are far more expensive than servers. I realize 
that if you put the poll rate low enough, polling can achieve the same as 
notification but the rates required for many services make notification scale 
better than polling. 


In my experience, even where NOTIFY is used to provide update notifications 
today, SUBSCRIBE is not.   Yes, that is non-standard, but I think it 
demonstrates concern about the overhead relating to SIP subscription/refresh. 
__

Having dealt with many or the problems that come from setting MWI lights using 
NOTIFY without subscribe I am fairly confident that this NOTify without 
SUBscribe is broken is some many ways it is not even worth discussing. 

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