That’s precisely one of the use cases we had in mind!
Unfortunately, the current implementation only supports specifying a list of servers on start-up. Note that it’s possible to specify addresses where a server might be in the future. Draw back of this is that Clients hail the servers in their list periodically at around 2 Hz rate until server are brought up online. However, this hailing frequency can also be configured using XML files.
Most definitely. As Clients are independent applications from the Server, the server going down only affects to discovery while it’s down, but publications and subscriptions already created will keep working normally. As you say, once the server is up and running again, it will re-discover the entire graph, a new publications and subscriptions will be discovered and distributed as if nothing happens. Furthermore, if the server is configured as backup, it will load the discovery graph from permanent storage at start up time.
Yes it can. Although not Servers not Clients have any specific configuration for this, their participants can be configured in the same way as before to limit the amount of allocated space dedicated to discovered entities. This of course requires prior knowledge of the network topology, but it is achievable in the same manner as for the SDP using XML files.