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Re: libcurl 8.16.0 spawning large number of getaddrinfo threads?

From: Demi Marie Obenour <demiobenour_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:29:27 -0400

On 10/19/25 06:01, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Oct 2025, Demi Marie Obenour via curl-library wrote:
>
>> Should distros build with c-ares by default? I'm wondering if getaddrinfo()
>> is just too poor an interface.
>
> Yes, getaddrinfo is a terrible interface and getaddrinfo_a is not helping.
>
> Unfortunately, doing a 100% functional drop-in replacement for getaddrinfo has
> turned out to be a really difficult task. Several distros have through times
> tried to ship curl built with c-ares for this reason, but so far everyone has
> eventually had to back down from that decision because of some special edge
> case where c-ares did not behave like getaddrinfo.
>
> With luck, one future day c-ares has gotten all of those problems ironed out
> and we can switch to a proper asynchronous name resolver more universally...

Personally I think all distros should ship a validating resolver that
listens on loopback. c-ares could then talk to it.

In the future it might make sense for curl to use systemd-resolved's
D-Bus API or the ncsd IPC API.
-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)




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Received on 2025-10-20