Yes, this can work, and will achieve my stated goal. My stated goal, however, does not tell the whole story...

I suppose my follow-up to this would be -- Can BIRD run in a shadow/read-only mode, allowing a primary BIRD process to read/write data into memory, but multiple BIRD processes to read the primary's memory space, each with a unique control socket for direct queries?

The above is meant to serve as an extremely scalable system for querying BIRD directly, while distributing queries across multiple read-only workers; at the same time not duplicating the memory space of the parent BIRD process for each worker. As it stands, the BIRD memory space I am trying to query consumes about 1.1GB, and yields 5,000 queries per second before a core reaches 99% CPU. I would like to scale this out, and achieve (5,000 * n) QPS without also consuming (1.1GB * n) memory.

Thoughts?

-- Eric Cables

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Ondrej Zajicek <santiago@crfreenet.org> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 06:05:01PM -0700, Eric Cables wrote:
> Is it possible to run BIRD in a speaker-only only mode, such that it does
> not bind to a local TCP socket, for the BGP protocol? While i can bind BIRD
> to different TCP ports at start-up, many vendors do not support specifying
> a destination port other than tcp/179.

There is no option for this, but you could either bind BIRD instances to
a different port or to a different IP (listen option). If you bind BIRD
to a different port, you don't need to configure neighbors - outgoing
connections will be still to tcp/179.

--
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'SanTiago' Zajicek (email: santiago@crfreenet.org)
OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."

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