(RADIATOR) Duplicate Requests - Randomness

[Joe Hughes]

> The way we worked around this was to put the RADIUS accounting data in a
> separate database and keep the recovery method on "simple".  That way
> you're not creating a transaction log entry for every insert.  Of course
> there is some risk that if you don't back up your data that often you
> can lose a chuck of accounting records.  With the amount of records we
> insert we just couldn't find a way around it.  We use transactional
> replication to another server, so any loss would be minimized to only
> several seconds.

That's the approach we took once we realised the database was part of
the cause. Our accounting table is really only there to store historic
data and the INSERT also fires off a couple of triggers to calculate
daily\average usage on a per-user basis. I think in times of load, and
by that I mean 'slight' load in the grand scheme of things (e.g.
during backups etc) - it's enough to block the INSERT sufficiently
enough to cause us problems.

> Try to keep away from db maintenance methods that will cause locks on
> the table.  ie:  it's probably ok to do an integrity test, but
> rebuilding the indexes could be painful on a table with millions of rows.

The maintenance plan has now been modified to do the bare minimum -
the table is only really there for raw data storage\historic data, we
won't be querying it much.  We'll also be doing a DTS job to dump the
data out to files, zip it up, and archive it off.

> Finally run two instances of Radiator on your server.  One for
> accounting and one for authentication requests.  Since Radiator has to
> wait for database queries to return before handling another request, you
> don't want your accounting lag to hold up your authentication process.
> This really fixed a lot of the problems for us.

Good advice - I will look into this. We currently run Radiator as a
service - would we just need to install two services "Radiator - Auth"
and "Radiator - Acct" or something similar?

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