October 15, 2004 - Spread Concepts LLC and Johns Hopkins Center for Networking and Distributed Systems are happy to announce the release of a new stable version, 3.17.3, of the Spread toolkit (http://www.spread.org).

Spread is a toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across external or internal networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast and group communication support. Spread services range from reliable message passing to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees, even in case of computer failures and network partitions.

Please be aware, that under the Spread Open Source License, the toolkit may be freely used only under some conditions. For example, the license includes the requirement that all advertising materials (including web pages) mentioning software that uses Spread display a specific acknowledgement. Please review the license agreement for more details. http://www.spread.org/license/

Other commercial licenses or other licensing arrangements are available.
Please contact info@spreadconcepts.com.

The 3.17.3 release includes a few enhancements and a number of fixes. They include fixing some daemon crashes, a substantial decrease in memory usage under some scenarios, new build files for VC++.NET, a Spread sptmonitor program that works on Windows, and some small cleanups and stability improvements. So we highly encourage everyone to upgrade to this release.

The 3.17.3 release has no external api changes (but does fix a few api implementation bugs so check the details below).

New minor features:

1. Add new option to spflooder. The -n option allows a fixed "number of members" to be set. This then activates a multi-sender flow control algorithm to allow flooding tests with several senders. All of the processes need to join the group (i.e. they cannot be -wo (write-only)) but not all processes have to send. This allows easy testing with differing numbers of senders (just change how many spflooders start with -ro and how many do not).
2. Modify monitor so it will run correctly on Windows. This was done by modifying monitor.c so it can also build as a threaded program and on windows will use multiple threads to send/recv updates and get user input. (A POSIX thread option is also added).
3. Add new Alarm priority flag to print a line with no datestamp
   (for multi-line output).
4. Add new Windows VC++.Net project files to daemon/win32_msvc_net. The current project files in daemon/win32 remain as they can be used in VC++ (version 6).

The list of bugfixes is:

1. Fix memory leak in Skiplist. Reported by Taj Khattra, patch by Theo Schlossnagle.
2. spuser,spflooder, and spmonitor fixed to print correct name in help. Patch by Daniel Rall.
3. Fix incorrect alarm printing where WARNING messages generated by older Alarm() interface were not printed.
4. Fix a bug in the Windows build using VC++ of thread-safe libtspread.lib. Bug and fix by Jacob Green.
5. Fix bug in libspread where if the groups array or message body passed to SP_recv* was too small, the mess_type field returned would be truncated and the sender field was not returned. They are both now returned correctly. Bug report and partial fix provided by John Schultz.
6. Fix bug where SP_Join and SP_Leave do not report an error if a group name is too long (instead they truncated it) Reported with fix by David Parker.
   ** Warning, this could break buggy applications who use long groups and assume the name is truncated.
7. Cleanup compile warnings where E_queue() used with no-parameter functions (not all uses fixed) and fix incorrect use of signed int with strlen().
8. Fix few cases in flooder.c and user.c that did not use the defined MAX_MESSLEN constant. Tested to verify that increasing MAX_SCATTER_ELEMENTS in scatter.h and the MAX_MESSLEN defines in user.c and flooder.c is sufficient to support arbitrarily large message sizes with Spread. This is NOT recommended, but several people do it anyway :-)
9. Make E_delay() work on Win32.
10. Added check that a segment using localhost (i.e. 127.0.0.255) is NOT in a spread.conf with any other segments using real IP addresses. This configuration will not work correctly and is usually because the example localhost configuration provided with Spread is added to. This check will cause the daemon to exit immediately after parsing the config file.
11. Fix bug where if more then 22 daemons start at the same time, some will crash or the membership will not complete correctly. This bug was reported by several people including Jesse Noller.
12. Fix Java spread connection problem where several threaded connections from same process cause unexpected connection failures. Reported by Brian Moseley, idea of fix by Ryan Caudy, patch by Jonathan Stanton.
13. Fix EVS bug where AGREED messages may be delivered before a transitional signal on some daemons and after it on others. Bug found and patch created by Ryan Caudy.
14. Make SP_connect_timeout() calls non-blocking for the actual 'connect()' call. This should fix the issue reported by Shlomi Yaakobovich where a hung daemon causes new connections to also hang in connect. Also includes slight cleanup of connect code path.