Spread Release 4.2.0rc2 Out for Testing

We are very happy to announce an RC2 testing release of the Spread Toolkit version 4.2.0.

This RC2 release is publicly available from a download from the public SVN repo as the tagged release svn+ssh://svn.spread.org/spread/tags/RC2_4_2_0 or from the Spread website (http://www.spread.org/download.html) .

This RC2 release has all planned changes, fixes and updates already included so if no problems are found we plan to release this as the final release in a week or two. Therefore, we would encourage everyone to try this release out over the next week or two and let us know if you find any regressions or problems as it includes a number of bug fixes and we would like it to be a stable release when finalized.

The Spread 4.2 release is an important bugfix release for the Spread project. This release has a large number of small changes which include bugfixes, very specific performance improvements, and general improvements to the code and build process.

The main new features of this release are:
1) Added Keepalive support to client-server TCP connections. Requires correct operating system values set for keepalives in order to be useful.
2) Switch internal code to use MONOTONIC clocks when available and appropriate to remove chance of system clock changes (from the clock being set) from affecting message processing
3) Break out events, memory, data_link and alarm code into separate libspread-util package. This package also has a number of improvements in the functionality of those code files which are listed in the internal package release notes.

It also includes a number of important bug fixes. The most significant include:
1) Fix bug with structure size on 64 bit platforms causing crash.
2) Fix several deadlock, crashes and race conditions in java Listener code.
3) Fix 100 ms timeout in java socket handling code so it does not corrupt messages that take a long time to arrive.
4) Fix java disconnect bug that prevented client from reconnecting until restarted.
5) Remove cause of slow message delivery when a client is receiving a lot of messages and gets into a badger state.
6) Improve help output and error messages in utility programs.
7) Fix token hurry bug that caused messages to have a 2 second latency in specific circumstances.
8) Fix crash bug when new daemon configuration files are loaded while the system is running.