Re: New libgtop maintainer

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 11/08/13 13:20, Maciej Piechotka wrote:
> As a question - what about timeouts? Usually gnome-system-monitor is
> useful when there is heavy I/O, CPU usage or swapping and in such cases
> dbus timeouts can and do happen.

During system bus service activation (the first time the system service
is started), there are a couple of timeouts that are only configurable
system-wide by the sysadmin: the activated system service must connect
to the system bus within 'activation_timeout' milliseconds (25 seconds
by default), although I think systemd activation might bypass this and
have its own timeout inside systemd instead. Once it has started
authentication, it must also complete authentication within
'auth_timeout' milliseconds (30 seconds by default) to make it harder to
DoS the system bus.

For method calls and replies once the system service is already up, ask
yourself "how long am I prepared to wait for this information?" and set
your timeout accordingly. Method calls usually use the special timeout
of "-1 milliseconds" (interpreted as an implementation-dependent
default, which in practice is 25 seconds) but whenever this is not
reconfigurable by the caller, that should be considered to be a library bug.

    S