microsoft / microsoft/dcp

Add a network port pool concept for allocating discrete service ports

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enhancement
Dominant language
Go
Stars
189
Forks
24
Avg merge
2d 16h
Merged PRs (30d)
18

Description

We recently tracked a long running Aspire issue (https://github.com/dotnet/aspire/issues/9919) down to just-in-time ephemeral port conflicts in a specific environment. Effectively in the time between us determining a specific ephemeral port was free and a service launching using that port, some other socket connection on the machine temporarily reserved the port in question. As the port was unused when checking the networking results immediately after the conflict, the likely cause is outgoing network connections as they also consume a port from the ephemeral range.

One option to avoid this issue would be to implement effectively our own internal port pool. We would take a (configurable) range of non-ephemeral ports and identify unused ports in the range to assign to Executables. This would force us to take on some of the work that ephemeral ports provide in identifying an unspecified available port, but the only way we'd encounter a conflict is if another socket on the machine was explicitly assigned the same port in a very short window of time, which is much less likely than an ephemeral port collision.

Main things to work out is performance impacts of searching ports, what would be a reasonable default range, and how we want to allow port ranges to be configured (we at least should support exclusion lists) to avoid conflicts with other services that might need specific ports.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the linked Aspire issue 9919 and the DCP executable port-allocation entry point. Work out the performance of searching a configurable non-ephemeral range, a reasonable default range, and support for exclusion lists. Done means executables receive ports from the pool while avoiding the stated conflict scenarios.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
backend, networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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