[Setup] babble.client, babble.server

[Jan-Carel Brand]

Hi Hannes

> Hello ,
> 
> i've successfully installed the babble.client, babble.server product on
> my plone 4.0.7 instance using the corresponding eggs in the buildout.cfg.
> Everything works fine so far but from time to time i see the lots of
> entries like this my instance.log file:
> 
> 2011-07-07T15:54:58 ERROR babble.client/browser/chat.py initialize:
> timeout error for  hg at automatx.de
> ...
> 2011-07-07T15:55:13 ERROR babble.client/utils.py: Socket error from
> get_online_contacts: server.getOnlineUsers: timed out
> Is the chatserver running?
> ...
> 2011-07-07T15:55:23 ERROR babble.client/utils.py: Socket error from
> get_online_contacts: server.getOnlineUsers: timed out
> Is the chatserver running?
> ...
> 2011-07-07T15:59:39 ERROR babble.client/browser/chat.py poll: timeout
> error for  hg at automatx.de
> 
> During this phase a "Connection refused" line appears inside the
> babble.client window. Yesterday the phase took about 10 minutes after
> that everything was ok again.
> 
> Today i found an additional hint in the instance.log:
> 
> 2011-07-07T15:55:53 ERROR Zope.SiteErrorLog 1310046953.640.309126118049
> https://automat.utfs.org/Plone/@@babblechat/send_message
> Traceback (innermost last):
>  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish
>  Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply
>  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 47, in call_object
>  Module babble.client.browser.chat, line 188, in send_message
>  Module xmlrpclib, line 1199, in __call__
>  Module xmlrpclib, line 1489, in __request
>  Module xmlrpclib, line 1237, in request
>  Module babble.client.tool, line 24, in getreply
>  Module httplib, line 990, in getresponse
>  Module httplib, line 391, in begin
>  Module httplib, line 349, in _read_status
>  Module socket, line 427, in readline
> timeout: timed out
> 
> Any help to solve this "timeout" problem is appreciated.

If you look in babble/client/tool.py there is a class
QuickTimeoutTransport that sets a timeout of 5 seconds.

This is the time after which XMLRPC calls (between the client and
server) will timeout.

These socket errors you are getting above appear to be timeouts. Why the
calls are taking longer than 5 seconds I don't know.

It can be due to latency, i.e whether you are running the client and
server on the same or remote machines. 

It could also be that the chat.server is locked or busy and cannot serve
the XMLRPC calls within 5 seconds.

See if there are any conflict errors stemming from operations in
babble.server.

To try and solve that, you can run the chat server on a completely
separate Zope server with it's own ZODB, thereby reducing the load on
that ZODB.

You can also try to increase this timeout number to 10 or something else
and see if it helps, and you if you wanted to help the rest of us out,
you could make this timeout variable user-configurable via the
portal_chat tool.

Regards
JC