[omniORB] linux, windows communication problem?

[Karl Schulze]

Hello all,

I have currently investigated a very odd problem when using omniORB 4.0.7.
The problem arises on several client/server applications I am working on.
The setup I am using is, running omniNames on a Linux box, running the 
servers on
a Linux box and running the clients on windows boxes. Within this setup 
the clients
sometimes are not able to to get objects from omniNames.

I was able to reproduce the problem with the echo example that is 
included in omniORB 4.0.7.
Therefore is started omniNames with the default parameters, except the 
following
scanGranularity = 1
inConScanPeriod = 1
threadPerConnectionPolicy = 0
maxServerThreadPoolSize = 5
The eg3_impl server ist started on the same machine as omniNames, 
without any special needs.
For the client I have used eg3_clt with some small notifications in 
'main', that are as follows
int
main (int argc, char **argv)
{
  try {
    CORBA::ORB_var orb = CORBA::ORB_init(argc, argv);

    for (CORBA::ULong count=0; count < 1000; count++)
    {
        cerr << count << "/1000" << endl;
        CORBA::Object_var obj = getObjectReference(orb);
        Echo_var echoref = Echo::_narrow(obj);
        hello(echoref);
        Sleep(2000);
    }

    orb->destroy();
  }
... the remaining code (except #include <Windows.h> for Sleep) is the 
original code.

Using now this modified client with the above mentioned omniNames, I get 
the error:
Caught system exception COMM_FAILURE -- unable to contact the object.
This usually occur  for count between 100 and 300, sometimes below 
sometimes above.

The problem seems somehow be related with the cleanup of the idle 
connections, because
when I set scanGranularity = 0 the problem no longer exist, but I need 
the cleanup of the
connections to prevent the omniNames to run out of network-file-descriptors.

I have also tried to use omniNames from 4.1.0beta2 that shows the same 
behavior.

Using Linux for the client does not show this problem.

Is this a known behavior? (I have searched the archive but found nothing 
that seems similar)
Anything I did wrong?

Regards,
Karl