Re: Need a word for...

[Wade Courtney <wade -dot- courtney -at- gmail -dot- com>]

thrashing
cycling

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:36 AM, McLauchlan, Kevin <
Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:

>
> Once again, I'm turning to the Techwr-l "reverse-lookup-dictionary" for a
> term that I'm pretty sure exists, but which is eluding me at present.
>
> Is there a general, or engineering, term for a condition where something is
> dropped/stopped and retries/resumes, but it happens so frequently and
> rapidly that it's annoying (or a drag on resources)?
>
> It's not "jitter", but a word of that sort.
>
> It's not a "race condition" - two signals or events 'racing' each other to
> determine an outcome... but sorta in the neighborhood.
>
> With that said, here's the situation.
>
> Picture a group of networked devices in a High Availability cluster
> configuration. They take part in load balancing, and they synchronize
> constantly to back each other up, in the event that one or more fails in
> some way. Now imagine they're geographically dispersed. Now imagine that the
> internet trunk from one country is flaky. It goes in. It goes out. It has
> its good days. It has its bad days. But the result is that the clustered
> appliance that lives at the other end of it can sometimes be dropping out
> and rejoining a _lot_.  Possibly to the point - if that network segment gets
> bad enough - that the unit is being dropped out even faster than it can
> rejoin (with all the necessary handshaking). So, perhaps the customers
> request a settable "rejoin delay", such that the member can be told to take
> a breather (of a specified length) before attempting to rejoin.
>
> What would be a good generic word for the sort of condition where something
> is being rapidly/frequently disconnected and keeps dutifully coming back for
> more punishment?  I imagine there's a common english word that engineers
> have co-opted for such a situation - perhaps a two-word phrase at most.
> It's not quite at the tip of my tongue - or my typing fingers.  Bugs me no
> end.
>
> Anybody?
>
>
> Kevin McLauchlan
> Senior Technical Writer
> SafeNet, Inc.
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