IP Background

[Juergen Christoffel <unido!gmdzi!lispm-1!JC@seismo.css.gov>]

Moin Folks.

My machine is a secondary namespace server and due to that it
continuously has a wholine telling "<N> active servers" (where N is a
fixnum >= 4) most of which are requests for NAMESPACE from various of
our about 2 dozen lispms here. This puts a heavy load on my machine
degrading keyboard and mouse response every so often.

I've counted accesses during the last 5 hours:

Host LISPM-11:  3250 times
Host LISPM-4:   3718 times
Host LISPM-12:  1839 times
Host LISPM-7:   3243 times
Host LISPM-18:  2308 times
Host LISPM-17:  3377 times
Host LISPM-5:   2599 times
Host LISPM-15:   109 times
Host LISPM-14:   892 times
Host LISPM-9:   3782 times
Host LISPM-16:   425 times
Host LISPM-19:  3528 times
Host LISPM-3:   4643 times
Host LISPM-8:     11 times
Host LISPM-2:    377 times
Host LISPM-6:   4834 times

As far as I know, that's caused by the IP background process, which runs
every TCP:*BACKGROUND-INTERVAL* sixties (defaults to 1 minute.) Is it
really necessary to run this thing every minute? Would it do any harm to
reduce it to e.g. 5 or even 10 minutes? Or would it degrade network
performance?

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

	--jc