Re: contrib: auth_delay module

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 5:41 PM, Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 5:38 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> I haven' t thought of a way to test this, so I guess I'll just ask.
>>> If the attacking client just waits a few milliseconds for a response
>>> and then drops the socket, opening a new one, will the server-side
>>> walking-dead process continue to be charged against max_connections
>>> until it's sleep expires?
>>
>> I'm not sure, either.  I suspect the answer is yes.  I guess you could
>> test this by writing a loop like this:
>>
>> while true; do psql <connection parameters that will fail authentication>; done
>>
>> ...and then hitting ^C every few seconds during execution.  After
>> doing that for a bit, run select * from pg_stat_activity or ps auxww |
>> grep postgres in another window.
>
> Right, I didn't think of using psql, I thought I'd have to wrangle my
> own socket code.
>
> I wrote up a perl script that spawns psql and immediately kills it.  I
> quickly start getting "psql: FATAL:  sorry, too many clients already"
> errors.  And that condition doesn't clear until the sleep expires on
> the earliest ones spawned.
>
> So it looks like the max_connections is charged until the auth_delay expires.

Yeah.  Avoiding that would be hard, and it's not clear that there's
any demand.  The demand for doing this much seems a bit marginal too,
but there were several people who seemed to think it worth committing,
so I did.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company